The Pacific Ocean
Not content with seeing just the Grand Canyon we decided it would be cool to drive from the Grand Canyon to the Pacific Ocean. Not a terribly long drive, but tiring none-the-less. It was certainly worth it to see this magnificent sunset, which we came close to missing!
Open PLS files using Windows Media Player
I recently switched from using Winamp to the new Windows Media Player 11. One downfall to this is internet radio streams that I like tend to use PLS files (playlist files.) I found a website that has a utility that basically converts the PLS files to ASX which Windows Media Player recognizes. Works like a charm.
Grand Canyon
I’m almost hesitant to post any of my shots from the Grand Canyon. They just don’t seem to really capture the size and beauty of that area. If you ever get a chance to visit it you should. You quickly realize that God is huge and beautiful. I almost posted this in black and white because it looks cool, but I wanted to show the colors in this amazing area.
Wallpaper – Desert Road
I got back from Vegas yesterday and hope to work on processing the 1000 or so shots I took.
Desert Road
I visited an Ansel Adams exhibition while here in Vegas and was highly moved by his images. I love the tones in his black and white images. When you think about the equipment he used while shooting you have to be impressed. I wonder what he would think of the digital cameras we use today compared to the huge equipment he carried.
The Wynn
One of the many really nice hotel/casinos here in Vegas. I’m going to guess by the grandeur and splendor of the casinos and other attractions that most people must lose a lot of money here. I still haven’t tried my hand at the gambling, mostly because as I walk through the casinos it doesn’t seem like most people are having very much fun. The ones that look like they are having fun are drunk and probably don’t realize the money they are losing. Not that everyone here loses money, but you don’t walk along and see lots of people hitting the jackpot. I guess it’s like any other pastime that can get out of hand quickly.
Joshua Tree
Las Vegas is certainly a different kind of place. I’m not particularly crazy about the main strip where the casinos and such are. The casinos and hotels themselves are interesting architecturally. One thing I don’t get are the numerous young people standing on the street handing out cards with mostly naked women. It’s kinda sad really. Then these cards are thrown on the ground so you end up walking on hundreds of them. I most like getting out of the city and seeing the desert and mountains. The landscape reminds me how incredibly awesome our God is. The trashing of women that goes on here reminds me about how badly the majority of people need God in their lives.
Light
John 12:46 I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness.
Las Vegas, a new 10-20mm lens and a remodeling project!
This coming Sunday I am headed to Las Vegas for a week. Brandon and I are going to be attending a Windows and Microsoft Exchange conference held there. The conferences are the main reason for us going there, but my next reason (and the part I’m looking more forward to…) is to get some good shots. We are planning on hitting the city hard and then heading to the Grand Canyon as well.
If there are anymore of you geeky photobloggers out there like us who will be attending the conferences let us know so we can hook up! I’m super excited and ready to get to shooting. If you visit my photoblog you’ll probably notice that I haven’t been posting much lately and that’s because I haven’t been shooting much lately. I haven’t picked up my camera nor done much post-processing much at all for about a month or more. I just needed a break from it and have had a bunch of other things come up. One major project is we are re-modeling our bathroom, so that’s consumed every free minute for the past week and I’m barely half way there!
At this stage in the project I’ve removed the old yellow tile that was around the bathtub and along the wall by the toilet. I’ve removed the sheet rock that was behind the tile and started to hang the hardibacker where I’ll be putting tile back up. Tommorrow I’ll be removing the tub, replacing the fixtures and finishing putting up the hardibacker. I’ll try to remember to post some after pictures when we are done. I wish I had took some shots before we started, but oh well.
Anyways, since we are headed to Vegas and will be wondering around the landscape outside it and by the Grand Canyon I thought I really wanted to use a wider angle lens so I’ve got one of the 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC Sigma lens. I’ve played around with it a little and am liking it so far. Check back next week and see if I manage to get any good shots with it!
10-20mm Lens Shot
Nothin special…just playing with a 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC Sigma lens. I’m heading to Las Vegas this weekend and wanted a lens that would give some good wide shots. We plan on heading to the Grand Canyon and thought this lens would come in handy around that area. I’m digging it so far. Check back next week for some shots from Vegas. My hope is to find some really cool stuff around that area.
Cool Program – Album Cover Art Download
I’ve been working on cleaning up my music directories, by fixing the tags and adding album art and such. In doing this I’ve been using Windows Media Player 11 which I’m actually liking a lot. Partly this is because I use Windows XP Media Center edition on my home computers and when I play music in my living room it’s normally through Media Center which uses Media Player at it’s core. So, Windows Media Player generally does a good job with getting album art and renaming the files with album and artist name etc. Everynow and then it doesn’t get the album art because maybe it’s some obscure CD or something.
So, I normally goto Google and search for the album or artist name and find the album art on some website. I also tend to use Amazon.com to find them as well. I found a program called, oddly enough, “Album Cover Art Download.” It works great and I’ve been able to use it to find a lot of album art. I haven’t played with it extensively, but you can have it automatically scan your music folder and download album art as well.
Cleaning up your music after collecting it for several years can be a huge chore and it’s a slow process, but it’s worth it to be able to browse your music collection and see all the album art along with it. I despise CD’s anymore and I now purchase almost all of my music exclusively through online sites such as iTunes, but a lot of my older music was collected before there was much support for album art etc. Add to this the fact that much of my music isn’t really mainstream stuff and it makes keeping it organized difficult.
Playtime
Sony Reader review
I’ve longed for a way to read books on an electronic device for along time. I’ve tried reading on Tablet PC’s, Pocket PC’s, Palm Pilots, Notebooks and standard PC’s and have never been able to read a book for an extended period of time. The Sony Reader has changed this. I’ve been able to sit and read a couple of different books for several hours at a time and could read longer if I could just stay awake!
The screen looks great and the brighter the room light the better the screen looks. The lack of back light is a downfall in low light situations, but leaving out the back light is one of the reasons the battery lasts as long as it does and this I’m sure helps keep the cost down as well. At 6 inches the size of the screen seems perfect to me. The interface is a bit slow, but then again, the prime use of the device is to read books so the speed isn’t a concern to me. It has somewhere around 92mb of built in memory. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but it actually turns out to be plenty. I’ve added a 2gb SD card as well, so I have more books on the thing, than I could read in a year and much space left over. Most of the books are going to be 2mb or less, mostly less. I’ve subscribed to some RSS feeds using the Sony software and many of those are 5mb or less.
The software for getting books on the device leaves a bit to be desired in my opinion. It’s not that straight forward and could use some improvements.
Sony’s website says the battery will last for 7500 page reads on one charge. I’ve read close to 200 pages of one book and 50 or so of another on one charge and the battery indicator hasn’t budged from showing full, so it looks like battery life will be a non issue. I don’t see myself sitting through 7500 pages in one sitting in this lifetime.
I haven’t tried the built in MP3 player, but I would think that would drop the battery life some at least. With my added 2 gig memory card, I have plenty of room to throw some good reading music on it. You can also put pictures on the device that look surprisingly good for being black and white or more like shades of grey.
One thing that Sony did do to offset the somewhat pricey device, was to give you a $50 credit to it’s online book store. With this $50 I bought three books and still have $15 left. The books I purchased are new books as well, so this was a nice addition. Buying books from within the software was a piece of cake as well. The price is a bit high at $349, but it does what it’s supposed to and does it well in my opinion.
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No more milk
Wallpaper – Boat
Wallpaper – Bench
Fixer Upper
I actually picked up my camera and took some shots this weekend…it felt good.
RPad and LPad function for VB
Function Rpad(ByVal MyValue$, ByVal MyPadCharacter$, ByVal MyPaddedLength%)
Dim x As Integer
Dim PadLength As Integer
Padlength = MyPaddedLength – Len(MyValue)
Dim PadString As String
For x = 1 To Padlength
PadString = MyPadCharacter & PadString
Next
Rpad = MyValue + PadString
End Function
Function lpad(ByVal MyValue$, ByVal MyPadCharacter$, ByVal MyPaddedLength%)
Dim x As Integer
Dim PadLength As Integer
PadLength = MyPaddedLength – Len(MyValue)
Dim PadString As String
For x = 1 To PadLength
PadString = PadString & MyPadCharacter
Next
lpad = MyValue + PadString
End Function
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I’m slowing down posting lately, if you hadn’t noticed. Instead of trying to post something everyday on days when I just don’t have anything I like, I’ve decided to just not post. I’m sort of taking a breather and will only be posting every couple of days or so. I plan on diving back in full boar in the coming weeks.
Our deepest fear
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
~ Marianne Williamson
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Case sensative join in SQL Server
I ran into an interesting situation today while writing a query in Microsoft SQL Server’s query analyzer. I have a table with people’s information in it. One of the columns is blood type. In this column you have one of the following values: O,o,A,a,B,b,C,c. In another table I have a map of various ways of showing someone is O Negative. The main way we tend to show it is O- or O+ or A- or A+ etc. Well, when I joined the two tables and attempted to use one of the mapped columns to represent the blood type the number of records doubled.
What on earth is going on? After some playing I found that joining the tables was creating doubles because the query was seeing O the same as o (one being uppercase and one being lowercase.) It was ignoring the case of the values. Apparently there are some settings to make your SQL server case sensative or not case sensative when you install SQL Server. I don’t remember that part, but I wan’t about to go changing any settings and risk the other databases on the server freaking out and causing havok.
So after some Googling I found the following to do a case sensative join since my server is ignoring it:
Select blah, blah, blah
FROM Donor D left outer join abomap A on convert(binary(3),d.btype) = convert(binary(3),a.id)
The key is using the convert function to convert the blood types to binary which you end up with different values from an uppercase O and a lowercase o and your join turns out the way it should.
Pretty cool huh? Well, at least me and the gorilla did. :)
Bird girl 2
This girl was treating the pigeons around downtown Chicago as pets. She kept breaking pieces of bread and sprinkling them all over herself and the birds would walk around on her and eat. Not sure this would be sanctioned by most health departments.
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Wallpaper – Blur
Wallpaper – Water across rocks
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