Crawling out from under the weather

Been hearing about the "wonderful" weather on the U.S. mainland and elsewhere. Well, we have had our share in sunny Hawaii. A couple of weeks of rain, some torrential, leaving us looking and feeling a bit gray (or grey, not sure which).

There is a light at the end of this tunnel, so to speak. Hope you can see the light at the end of your tunnel. And also hope that it's not the light of a... well, we won't think about that.

Hope your year closes on a high note, and may the next year be a lot better. Be safe and healthy.

Mele Kalikimaka from the Shaka Santa

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, um, and anything else that I may have missed.

Hope you folks have a merry and safe holiday season! Enjoy your time with your loved ones, and please be careful; we want to do this all again next year!

What I see...

...is often not even close to reality. Possibly to the point of the surreal. And no drugs are involved.

Click through to follow the image, and see what "reality" was. Then tell me, is something not right with my head?

I will enjoy this moment of unreality while I can, since reality rather bites at this time. I guess it doesn't help that I enjoy the old Chinese and Japanese brush paintings, with the mountain receding into the mist... A discussion with a co-worker reinforced that thought, so here it is, my unphotography moment.

A little residual warmth your way...

For all you poor folk that are freezing, but don't like it. On the other hand, you could always come over and experience it first-hand, eh?

Just teasing. Please keep warm, hug a friend or three. Even the fuzzy ones.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Warm thoughts to those in the cold climes. It is a frigid sixty-something Fahrenheit, here; bring your warm t-shirt and shorts.

DSLR cleanup, a small ephiphany

Just finished cleaning the sensor on my DSLR, and found that the mirror is leaving a lot of crap behind. Tried a continuous mode firing sequence while pointing at a clear blue sky, and a previously pristine sensor became a carpet of lint.


I zoomed in to a part of the sensor that normally seems to gather stuff, and rolled through the frames. Each frame got progressively dirtier. Changed to JPEG/Basic, so my buffer lasts longer, then held down the shutter button until the buffer filled, again facing up.

Ran through another cleaning cycle, and repeated the firing sequence. It was much better this time. Cleaned one more time, made sure all my setting were correct (including the image quality), and put it away.

I should send this body in for cleaning. The camera, too. But, I think I got rid of that wild hair that was showing up at the top of my frames...

So the news is out...

Our new boss has been selected. Interesting to have someone that has some background in the field; been awhile.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is an American holiday, to celebrate place, and surviving long enough to get to that place.

I am:
Thankful to have a close family.
Thankful that I have a job.
Thankful that I have the choice to do the things that I want to do that does no harm to others.
Thankful to be able to participate in this exercise of sharing.

Have a good one, all!

Swirling

Tis' work, at the moment. Waiting for the new administration to settle in so we can get on with things. Understand that these things take time. The new Legislature and its new leadership is probably chomping at the bit, waiting to cut us to pieces.

In other news, I got my new desktop going. Don't have a productivity suite, yet; I think I did something wrong with the OpenOffice.org installation, and it blew up my load sequence. Got it ripped out and the ship righted itself. Thinking about what I want to do, now; might have to bite the bullet and get MS Office 2010.

That step into 64-bit MS has opened my eyes some; lots to be wary about. Since work stuff is way behind, I may have to just not worry about backward-compatibility and go forward with evaluating everything as new. I can tell it will be expensive, though, and users will freak, especially those that have a hard time with change.

Another thing this move has "forced" me to do is accelerate my move to larger external storage. Got a 5-drawer Drobo, and shoved 5 2TB drives into it, RAID 5, so I have a 1 drive failure cushion. Bought the spare, too, because you never know what will be available when things hit the fan. Network-based, so I can now reach files from multiple stations. Nice, that.

And then... I forget. Ah, old age.

Heart attack

Opened the camera bag, and saw what I thought were shiny shards of glass strewn throughout the bag. Already high blood pressure goes up, breath shortens; did I lose a lens? Trashed an LCD? Mirror blew up? Prism shattered? I hold my breath and check the gear; nothing wrong.

Perplexed, I picked up one of the "shards" and...freakin' desiccant beads! Bag blew up; Whew!

Okay, so it there a better way to put one of those desiccant pouches in a camera bag?