Friday, July 29, 2005

I love this site

The Cellar's Image of the Day (don't miss the Archives section!). Some of the most fascinating photos I've ever seen. I'm giving it a permalink on the right hand side of the page, so I remember to hit it more often than I now do.

They even accepted an image I found elsewhere online as their IOTD once (although I was uncredited...I see they take after Slashdot in that regard). http://cellar.org/iotd.php?threadid=5435.

Does this all sound familiar to you? Have I posted this before? Damn my drug-addled brain.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Appreciate me, damnit!

System Administrator's Appreciation Day 07.29.2005.

Gifts and adulation shamelessly accepted (preferably gifts ;).

Monday, July 25, 2005

uggghhhh

Bachelor party over the weekend. I'm not sure...but I think I may *still* have a hangover.

All well worth it, tho.

Friday, July 15, 2005

New photo posted

I finally put up a new photo on eighteenpercent.net yesterday. Look over to the right to see a thumbnail. Click that to see the larger sized one. It's the Bodie Island lighthouse in Nags Head NC, taken at sunrise last week. Kinda cliche', but it was a nice shot anyway.

Odd thing was, when looking at the photos they sold in their gift shop, my shot was better than 50% of them. Many of thiers were grainy, poorly framed, or just ugly. Made me feel like an accomplished phtog, seeing that some of my work was better than some of what's out there commercially. Now I just gotta get them to sell my work.

When I took the shot, it was about 6am and probably close to 80 degrees out and super humid. I was in a long sleeve shirt, bluejeans, my rain jacket (with hood pulled up) and a baseball hat. The mosquitos on the outer banks are awful. I still came away with bites, but they'd have been worse had I not been covered. By the time I finished, I looked like I had just come out of the water. Soaked.

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Review: MediaGear 40GB portable storage device (hard drive/card reader)

Abridged version: Run for your f*cking lives. Don't touch this piece of shit (or it's 60GB big brother) with a 10' pole. Read on for more...

==============================

This is a review I wrote for Amazon.com in November, about 12:30am when I *really* needed to be in bed...but I couldn't delay getting it down on paper, as it were. All the sentiments and emotions still hold true. I gave the company another try (cautiously) with it's 60GB version, and it behaved almost exactly the same way, requiring me to rescue files via data recovery programs (this time I was smart enough to leave copies of the pix on my laptop, unlike the SF episode detailed below). Also, this time, I was smarter in that I fdisked and formatted and scanned and surface scanned the drive before leaving home. Wish that would have helped. So without further ado...

I am so fuious, I am shaking as I type this. I have just returned from a trip across the country to San Francisco CA and this piece of junk unit nearly cost me 20% of the photos I took!!!

I shooot with a Canon 20D and both a 512MB and 1GB Kingston CF card. I have been using this setup since the 20D's release a couple of months ago with NO problems or corrupt files or anything similar.

On the trip to CA, I shot over 1,200 shots in a week. At one point, I encountered a problem dumping the 1GB card to the unit. The unit reported "data transfer error" at about 13% of the transfer. Since I could not empty the card, I could either format it and lose everything on it, or leave the pics on it, and use only the 512MB card. I took the second option.

So I unhappily limped through my vacation like that. Upon returning home, I attached the unit to my computer. Over 20% of the directories showed up as empty, or corrupt (these were directories which appeared to transfer fine in the filed!!!). I nearly fainted. Luckily (being an IT professional), I was able to mostly rescue 186 files (608MB of data), although some of those are destroyed images. All of the recovered files were recovered as Windows "CHK" files (after a few disk checks). Non-geeks would have been hard pressed to recover much without professional help.

Bottom line, when I ran Windows disk checks on the unit, it came back with *numerous* errors. Inexcusable! My unit was purchased new and was babied every step of the way. I even tested out the transfer of both JPG and RAW (CR2) files before leaving home. I guess I should have run full scandisks against the thing too. Lesson learned.

So, final word: run away from this unit. I don't care how good of a deal you think you're getting. I would not trust it to hold up my coffee table any more. Once I'm sure I've saved all I can from it, I'm fdisking and formatting it and it's going back to the store it came from. It's a shame. The unit cost the same as another model with half of the storage capacity. Guess the old adage "you get what you pay for" holds true here.


Buy something else. Trust me on this one.

Monday, July 11, 2005

hahaha

You said it...



(Photo taken by a guy on one of the photography mailing lists I read. See his site here.
***NEWSFLASH***

People are stupid.

(from the Washington Post (beware compulsory registration and countless pop-ups at the above link)).

A summary, if the WashPost offends you as it does me:

The High Price of Puppy Love

Pet pampering services are in big demand in the Washington area, ranging from day care to dance lessons and swimming classes.