June 2009 Archives

The US has their Car Insurance robocall scam, up here in BC we seem to have the "lower your credit card interest rate" robocall scam. The calls are robots, and generally go something like this, in a pleasant female voice: "There's nothing wrong with your credit card, but you could reduce your interest rate, the time for doing this will be over soon! Press 9 to change your interest rates now." Normally you hang up, or hit the number and yell at the person, demand to talk to a manager, and be put on hold forever or disconnected.

This time the conversation went something like this:

• Telemarketer: Hello? (almost like she wasn't sure why the phone was ringing, wonder in they have people working from home)
  
• Me: Hello.
  
• Telemarketer: Hello, this is Sunny! You were interested in lowering your interest rates?
  
• Me: Not really. If I ask to talk to a manager will I get to talk to a human, or will I get put in an infinite hold loop? Like what happened last time
  
• Telemarketer: Pause Do you really want the truth? OMG, honesty!
  
• Me: Ah, say no more. How about if I ask to get taken off the call list?
  
• Telemarketer: I'll take you off manually.
  
• Me: Thanks and hang up
  

I'm under no illusion that I'll not get another one of these calls of course, but it was refreshing to have just that hint of honesty, even if it's all said in the half second pause before answering a question.

Welcome to folks from the Blue Rodeo forums!

For A's birthday last night we went out to the Blue Rodeo concert out in Abbotsford. Had a good time, even with my allergies starting to stand up and make themselves known. I saw them back in 2002 in Vancouver, where they were great as well.

The concert itself was awesome, the opening act was Dustin Bentall, son of Barney Bentall, who I'd honestly never heard of before. Apparently Canadian Rock Royalty though. For the encores they brought out Dustin and his band as well as Barney on stage, and did a great extended version of "Try". Dustin's music was good enough I bought the CD, supporting local music and all that stuff.

All pics were with my LX3, chosen more for the colors and lighting, as sadly the only 2.5x zoom didn't give a whole lot of choice in view (I was jelous of the 18x zoom that the person beside me had!). I think the pics showed up pretty well though.

The band doing their thing.

Ohhhhh.... light show....

Jim Cuddy rockin' out.

Everyone on stage for the encore.

Click through to the image page on Flickr for my helpfully tagged who's who.

A few concert tips, learned on the fly:

• Sometimes having a faster shutter speed is worth a bit more noise. Most of these shots were ISO 200-400, with some noise cleanup afterwards. The noise sucked, but it's way more fixable in post processing than blurry band members.
  
• Your camera will lie to you about the exposure, you want to select either spot, 'center area' or a similar exposure setting and then focus on the center of the band, where it's lightest. Otherwise the camera will try to make the entire field of view (bright band area and dark theatre) into focus. You only really care about the band on stage, and generally speaking they will be bright enough that you can still get a good exposure without having to bump up the ISO of slow down the shutter speed too much.
  
• A little bit of a bump in the "clarity" setting in lightroom can give just a hint more definition in things like the heads in the foreground in the last image above. Just a hint though, or you start to lose/blur out the definition of things you care about.
  
• Shoot RAW if you can (ie: always). It'll give you the most forgiveness in post processing for dealing with lighting conditions (IE: your camera trying to figure out if the red/blue/yellow lights on stage are supposed to be white or not), noise reduction, etc.
  

I took some movie clips as well, so I'm playing with those in iMovie right now.

I have to say too, that technology is pretty awesome. While in the concert I was taking (horrible) pictures with my iPhone and posting them to facebook, able to research who Barney Bentall was on Wikipedia and could have either bought the latest CD from either of these guys and had the music loaded on my phone, or (through a few different tools) found their music on the pirate sites and had it starting to download onto my home computer. Wow, how the world has changed....

In an effort to clean out the basement, I'm selling off a bunch of the hardware I've accumulated over the years, or taking it to the dump or computer recycling place. If you're in the Fraser Valley and are looking for any of the following, email me at alan@ufies.org to let me know. Links go to the craigslist posts I've made which have links, prices and pictures.

• 26" Computer case with 450W Antec Power Supply
  
• CCNA Course Bundle: 2x Cisco 2501 and CCNA books
  
• 24 Port Unmanaged switch
  
• APC Back-UPS CS 350
  
• SCSI Hardware RAID Box
  
• Antec P160 Computer Case
  

There are lots of other things, old hard drives in the 2/4/40gb range, USB cables, tons of PATA hard drive cables, etc.