February 2008 Archives

No, it's not nearly as perverted as it sounds. I finally dug up the manual to the flash unit (the AG360FGZ for anyone whose counting) and started going through the different settings, learning (by doing this time) about high speed sync, leading/trailing curtain, different wireless modes, etc. I've read through them before of course, but hadn't done any real work with any of them.... just set the unit to the 'green' mode and clicky-clicky. In the actual doing I found all sorts of little gotchas and how things really worked (like the "HS" icon for high speed mode not showing up in high speed sync mode until you were at 180/s or over). Lots of fun. For the most part sleeping cats facing the wrong way were my subjects, as the point was not to create good photos, but to learn what happens when I click this button.

Ironically one pic that I felt was half decent enough to share ended up from one of the first shots, this is with (if I recall) the flash angled 90 degrees to bounce off the ceiling, with the wide angle flap down and the 'cachlight' flap up (note catchlights in the subjects eyes :) Pic is right out of the camera (well, from camera raw imported to Lightroom, converted to DNG, exported to JPG and then uploaded to the webserver :) No manipulation in between of exposure or anything. Great detail in the full size original, and the lighting and shadows I really like.

I do so enjoy wide angle lenses :) Click for bigger.

Aside: Anyone from the fraser valley area (Epp, I'm talking to you) interested in a photo-walk of some sort?

Argh, just when I thought I could avoid my lust for new camera hardware, I did this search.... lots of lenses appearing in good condition and under cost, and local. ARGH!

The kitten (a beta name of 'Carbon' (as in carbon copy of mom, dad, and other cats in the house) is under discussion right now) discovered a) a bowl and b) another kitten in the same bowl in the mirror! Sadly wasn't able to get any shots of the pair playing, maybe tomorrow :)

Anyone have any suggestions for names? I've posted lots of pictures so you folks are probably as familiar with him/her as I am... throw any suggestions for names into the comments please!

Just a quickie again.....

Turning into an arm cat.

I fully expect this to be the last thing I see one morning as I'm finally eaten by my pets.

The kitten is using mom as both chew toy and punching bag. Mom retaliates with the most feared weapon of all... baths!

Corny, my original tabby, who is slowly starting to hiss less at the new tabby (he's a crotchety old man these days).

That's it.... maybe a movie if I get the video splices into something resembling I'd share :)

I was going to take a bit of time tonight to trash the Knight Rider movie from last night, but it looks like IO9 has already done that far better than I could, with pictures and everything.

I also recommend reading the live blog if you watched the show, and re-live the cheese.

Conclusion: 8.5/10

I got into work today, plugged in my MacBook Pro to power, USB keyboard/mouse, network cable, and secondary display.... wait a minute, second display is still in power saving mode, that's odd.

OK, reboot. Nothing. Unplug, replug. Nothing. Troubleshoot by checking to see if the monitor works with another computer (it does), if the computer can output to a different DVI monitor (it could), and if a different DVI-to-VGA dongle worked (it didn't).

Bleah. I guess this is why $work got the AppleCare plan for me though, so I called up the number....

First of all, up to the part when you get on hold was great. There was none of the horrible voice-recognition systems that I've learned to despise and there were only three buttons to hit to get to where I wanted to be (1 for english, 1 for support, and 3 for laptops). However, once I got into the queue and waited for the five or so minutes they predicted the wait time would be, it rang, then I got nothing. After waiting for a couple of minutes with no hold music and no voice on the other end, I rang up and redialed.

The second time through I found that you could hit the number options before the full set of options has completed, bonus points for that. This time after the five minutes listening to elevator music I did actually get to talk to a real person (Stacy, who didn't sound like she was a call center in Bangladesh or some similar place).

Other than a bit of confusion as I had switched out the monitor that wasn't working for another monitor that also wasn't working (she thought that I meant that the old monitor worked and the new one didn't), and some standard troubleshooting which I had already done, then a couple of minutes more on hold while she consulted co-workers, she got me to do the vulcan neck pinch reboot (command-option power on then hold down P and R while standing on one leg at sunset of a full moon while the eclipse is in the northern hemisphere) to reset the PRAM. Voila, problem solved.

Pros

• Got the problem fixed (most important thing)
  
• Speaker had english as a first language
  
• Only 3 buttons to get to wait on hold
  
• Can hit buttons before voice finishes speaking
  
• No voice recognition software
  

Cons

• Was disconnected / frozen randomly on first call
  
• Wait time of 5 minutes each time (though these days that's still pretty low
  
• Sucks that the problem happened in the first place!
  

All in all a pretty good experience

Saw Jumper over the weekend Friday night with Dana and Firefly and FireflyBro. The movie was what my friend Bryan calls a "trailer movie", where basically all the good parts are in the trailer.

The movie wasn't bad, however it did suffer from a couple of odd things that jarred me.

• Pacing - There were a couple of times during I thought that the movie was getting into the good action parts, and instead it ground to a halt.
  
• Backstory - Really, the movie did as little as possible to get a backstory, but the parts that it did include were wedged in at odd angles shall we say. There was one part in the last few minutes of the movie that came out of nowhere and went nowhere, unless it's a super-setup for Jumper 2, though I somehow doubt there will be one, no matter how big the setup was (my current theory is they only make sequels to really bad movies (IE: Step it up 2) or really good movies (IE: The Dark Knight)).
  
• WTF was up with Samuel L. Jackson's hair, and why didn't he get to say "motherfucker" at all??
  

On the upside the jump-fight scenes were fun and IMHO well done (pacing issues and pointlessness aside) and the car ride sequence was very cool.

Sadly some of my impression of the movie was tainted by the horrible service I got from the 18 year old popcorn-slinger who probably makes $7 and hour and doesn't give a shit about his job and it shows. First they forgot to give us our popcorn and then didn't put the butter in halfway as well as on top like they normally do. The complete lack of giving-a-shit definitely shows and pissed me off, which didn't leave a good taste in my mouth for the movie.

I'm really sorry to do this to everyone... the last couple of days have had a fair amount of good cuteness to go around, so I feel obliged to post it here (as my random technical posts seem to garner no interest at all :P ). There's a whopper number of pics in the click more (and as always a larger size is available if you click on the pic)...

OMG have you ever seen such a fantastic expression?

I'm also really impressed with my camera.... even when I forgot to unset the 800 ISO it still took almost noiseless images, and when I threw on my flash unit with softbox it just looks awesome! Now to make the photographer even better as well! :)

I just re-read this blog post on Vista security as it was linked from the Vista SP1 RTM announcement and had a thought....

• Internet Geeks: Linux and mac are so much more secure than windows! Look at how few vulnerabilities there are for them!
  
• Microsoft and Friends: Those OSs only have a few percent of the market share, so they aren't targeted hardly as much, so of course there are less! Our OS is dominant so it's a much bigger target you silly little linux nerds!
  

And now with Vista....

• Microsoft and Friends: Vista is so much more secure than XP! Look at how few vulnerabilities there are for it!
  
• Internet Geeks: [...]
  

So should the Linux geeks response to the security in Vista be the same as it was from Microsoft about market share? A lot of the tech news and podcasts I read and listen to note that Vista doesn't seem to have the market penetration that it should have (a few of the TWiT podcasts have pointed out that the number of Vista users doesn't match anywhere near what it should compared to the number of new computers produced).

Anyway, just a thought....

Just a(nother) quick kitten post, this time including a movie posted. Kitten is starting to explore much more, and is getting used to being picked up and cuddled by people. The cutest thing lately is that she/he will sleep in the nest on top of mom's legs, with front paws wrapped around mom's legs and they twitch fantastically (see the movie for that).

Firefly came back from a trip today and flaked out on the couch, Kitten cuddled a bit with her.


Moments before this pic got snapped mom was staring intently down at the kitten instead of looking at me, and a couple of minutes after she jumped down and led the kitten back to the safety of the library where her nest is.

View the toe twitching movie (another iMovie experiment).

Speaking as someone who spent four years in a Hell described as "Tech Support for Realtors" back in the days before the internet was big and before there were high speed connections (read: we were configuring modems for a big dial in BBS) I can surely agree that All Users Lie.

It's interesting that Heidi used the hedge phrase "may be different" when her own study data showed that users' aspirations and reality were almost always different. Maybe she aspires to live in a world where aspirations and reality aren't so wildly divergent. I don't blame her. It'd be nice.

I remember being amazed at the people I used to support on the phone's lack of knowledge or just lack of understanding! I could go through 10 minutes of walking them through a procedure doing some sort of configuration and at the end they tell me to 'hold on for a minute, I need to write this down,' and then I find that the entire time they haven't been at their computer. *sigh*

I've talked before about the need for a secret tech handshake. The assumption that the person on the other end of the line knows nothing is always a safe bet, unless of course it's me calling in get support I wonder why people are always asking me stupid questions....