Category — Uncategorized

If you’ve watched any of the Olympics, you’ve no doubt seen the masses of photographers covering the event. (All those lust-worthy white lenses.) Vincent Laforet is covering the games for Newsweek, and while I’ve known he’s been blogging about it, I really haven’t been keeping up with my feed reader lately (work has me pretty busy right now).

If you want a sense of what it’s like to cover the largest sporting event, go read his post that he filed on covering Phelps historic 8th medal win and the men’s fencing final. Looking at the photos he has up, he was in that scrum of photographers that Phelps climbed through to hug his mom and sister.

We got some rain this weekend.

Well, more than “some.” When I left for work this morning we’d measured over 8 inches at our house. So far we have faired well, we only got a little water in the basement when a window well filled up. Turned out out gutters were clogged. After I stood on a metal ladder in a lighting storm and cleaned them out, we were ok. I wish I could say the same for our neighbors. Further down the street several people had the sewer back up into their basements. The city put a huge trailer mounted pump on the street and started pumping the sewer into the storm sewer.

The first photo at the left is from down the street. Underwood creek basically has left folks with as much as four feet of water in their backyards. Here is some video I shot with my cell phone (narrated by my 21mo son), followed by some more photos:

You’ll recognize these first two images from Project 365. Other than Saturday morning, the weather is about all I had time for this weekend. At the right is underwood creek as it flows across the street from our house. Normally it is maybe 5 feet across at this point. The sound when you stand on our front door step is like living near a waterfall as this shot is of the calm part, the rest are like mini class 3 rapids.

This is the foot bridge near the playground at Wirth Park, upstream from us. If I had to guess, normal level is about 4-5 feet less than this. I am thankful I’ve only had to deal with some minor puddles in the basement and having to drain water off of the pool twice. One neighbor down the street estimates he lost $100k worth of stuff when his basement filled with sewage.

So far, it sounds like everyone is safe, just wet.

Getting my weather geek on:

Another try at an 18mo portrait and this was the best of the bunch.  We ultimately decided on ordering prints of this and yesterday’s shot.

Here is an outake that was pretty funny:

My youngest heard a train horn (we live sort of close to some tracks - they’re about 1/4 mile away) and proclaimed “choo choo” and then started tugging on the box with all the trains in it.  So we got them out and he played with them up until bedtime.

This is my favorite train in the set, the green one’s name is Derek.  Here he is having a conversation with Sir Topham Hatt, the dude that runs the show.

Yes, I’ve lost it - I’m photographing toys.  Worse, I hated the lighting in the living room, so I broke out my lighting kit.  This was lit with a shoot through umbrella with a SB24 @ 1/4 power.

We officially got a metric ass-load of snow today.  This was the view out my front door.  That black spec near the base of the gas lamp is our mailbox.  I also got a shot out behind the house showing just how deep the snow was:

On Tuesday, a couple co-workers bet lunch that the forecast was all hype.  The over-under was 8″ with multipliers at 50% and 100%, meaning if their was under 4″ or over 16″ it meant two lunches.  Looks like Jason’s got two lunches coming his way.

Hard to believe it’s been 31 days! My youngest is sick with a fever, though once the Tylenol kicks in, he’s in good spirits, like here when he’s running trains down the hill.

Every time I use Adobe Flash, I end up feeling like a “very special” computer user, except one that is also drunk and wearing mittens. I can honestly have called myself a computer programmer of some sort since I was 7 (though I don’t list Apple Basic on my resume these days) and I’ve gotten to be a fairly competent Photoshop user, yet something about Flash is not clicking for me.

Tonight, I needed to update the banner that is on the home page at WMSE.org for an upcoming promotion they are having. It should have been pretty simple. There is a main SWF file that does the banner rotation, and I’ve edited that before, groping my way through ActionScript. It basically loads several other SWF’s to display as sort of a slideshow, but tonight I had to create a whole new SWF for it to display- nothing fancy, no animation, no video, and someone already did the artwork. Yet for the life of me it took almost an hour to figure out how to make it a clickable image. In the end, after much Googling I figured out how turn the image into an object, make it a button and set the action to getURL.

Oh yeah, WMSE has indeed updated it’s web site. I was a little premature back in December, but it’s been live now for a few weeks.  They will be promoting it on the air soon. There are still a few bugs that crop up from time to time (like random users can’t access the archives - if you’re one of them know I’m still trying to get to the bottom of it), but for the most part it is pretty solid, and is only going to get better from here.

Turns out the whole Black Mustang Club calendar issue came from Cafepress, the printer of the calendars.  They were concerned about the use of the Ford logo and contacted Ford to get approval.  Whitney Drake explained it to the club in a letter posted to their forums.

Wii Bowling last night.  One eff-ing frame away from a perfect game!

Yeah, the split in the fifth frame killed me.