December 2008 Archives

I did try to get to work today, I really did! I have (some) legitimate work to do, and a bottle of rum just waiting to be mixed with a drop of eggnog in my drawer (to make the day for the poor schlubs who are in on a Christmas Eve that much easier), but no go :( Got up as normal, it had snowed overnight but I figured I could make it.

Never got out of the driveway. 10cm of snow on top of a sheet of packed snow/ice let me get about halfway up the hill before I'd slide right back into the carport. Ah well, I hear from a coworker that the train is broken down at port moody and "transit is universally f--d." The translink transit alerts confirm this in less colorful terms. I guess the real test will be if Firefly's 4WD can make it out for the Christmas party this evening.....

Here are a couple of shots of what I woke up to:

Horrible.

Well, I have my car back, at only a bit more than I expected to pay. However I do have a car back, fixed with various new pumps, hoses, and belts. Many thanks to my folks for helping me on their end and the guys at Fraser Valley Sports Car for their quick work.

Weee...

Now to deal with Christmas.

Weee.

*sigh* So what else is going to go wrong. So far in the last little while:

• Got a note from the tax man saying there was missing paperwork from my taxes (due not to H&R block screwing up, but from the company I was working at that was acquired not giving me a T4, and of course now that company doesn't exist and no one from the acquiring company knows anything). So I had to pay over $600 extra.
  
• Got a note from the local municipality saying that our nice new fence and retaining wall on the side of the property was actually in the way of them getting to the creek beside the house, and we'd have to undo all we've done.
  
• When I renewed house insurance I found that since I've had two break-ins in 5 years, my insurance more than doubled. Yay. The bank was able to find another underwriter that was only almost-double though.
  
• Tonight heading to my folks for dinner (yummy lamb BTW) my car was acting a little funny. Getting there was ok, put water in as it was low, found that it was leaking out through a busted hose and refused to start at all. *sigh*. Now I have to figure out how to get a dead car from my folks house to a garage and back to me, their car back to them, all without going insane.
  

Update: Seems BCAA needs me to actually be at the car for them to tow it, which is just awesome...

So thanks to a tip from a friend taking a course from him, I found out that The Joe McNally is in Vancouver and was doing a lecture downtown. Being that I've read and pimped his book before, and he's done picture for oodles of places, including National Geographic, it was a pretty good idea to give it a listen, especially a the low low price of $45.

The talk included a session of talking and then some lighting setup and demo. The talk itself wasn't completely new material to anyone who has read The Moment It Clicks or seen his Authors@Google talk. Basically he's a great talker, funny, and with good stories and better pictures.

The lighting setup was also very cool, starting with a straight on camera flash and a model (a dancer) and moving to a softbox, hair light, background light, eye "zapper", and shoot-through diffuser all configured from his D3 with some magic do-everything flash configuration system, it was very cool to see the quality of pics on the screen change with each iteration and go from "ugh" to "wow" and then to "holy balls wow".

Course now it's a matter of getting my ass off the couch and to taking pictures so when the course is offered next year I'm worthy of taking it :)