Thirteen.One on the 10 Year Anniversary of 9/11

Greetings everyone.  It seems out of place to make a post about a personal event on this day of remembrance.  Therefore, let’s take a moment to send our thoughts and prayers to the victims of that fateful day 10 years ago.  I refuse to give the perpetrators the satisfaction of their actions and instead of focusing on the fear and uncertainty of that day (as every local newspaper and program I’ve come across today) I remember it as a day America came together.  There were no petty squabbles between neighbors, no politicians slandering one another in hopes of getting an extra vote and absolutely no uncertainty regarding the love for the best country in the world.  We were bound by a common cause and mad as hell.  To those that experienced a tragic loss I express my deepest sympathy.  To the heroes of that day and those who took up the fight I forever owe my gratitude with special appreciation to Seal Team 6 who demonstrated the inevitable outcome when mess with the Red, White and Blue.

As alluded to, this day also marked a big event on a personal front.  After 3 years of hard work and countless setbacks I had an opportunity to put another check on my Life List.  Some of you may know and some of you may not, but I have had a goal to run a half marathon for some time now.  With the accomplishment of the 15K under the belt (link) the next evolution of the challenge was the daunting half.  It doesn’t seem like much considering it is a just under 4 more miles but that itty bitty distance became my nemesis.  It seemed like every time I set out to prepare, something happened that cut that opportunity short.  The latest battle was with my torn hamstring which cost me all last year.  Thanks to a heavy regiment of therapy my leg problems were mostly brought under control requiring continual training consideration, but finally strong enough to take the pounding.  It was also evident some other things had to change to get in front of the numerous other injuries.  I dropped 16 pounds (as of weigh in before the race) and retooled my body for the requirements of running (translated .. core, core core).  This year’s racing circuit was geared to preparing for the this day – The 4 mile Chase warmup, the 15K Steamboat and the Bix7 all went well so optimism was in the air.  Through all this was a steady diet of short and long runs (practically every other day including training runs on vacation) to get me prepared for the extra 4.  As the days started clicking off I hit my distance marks culminating in the final 12.6 mile training run last Sunday.  I can honestly say the way I felt after that run left me a little skeptical I could pull it off.

Hit the jump to read more about the event .. with pictures!

Continue reading Thirteen.One on the 10 Year Anniversary of 9/11

Mozilla Thinks I’m a Gay Photographer Who Likes to Knit

How about that for a post title?  About now you are probably wondering what could possibly follow a title like that.  Well, let me explain myself or rather let me explain what Mozilla thinks of myself.  I was recently informed by my Firefox browser that an update was available.  Knowing those open source developers tend to get it right, I usually take them up on their patch requests.  After a quick download and a Firefox restart everything was up and running again.  Usually the “What’s New” tab is immediately deleted since it generally contains words to the effect web surfing is safer now or here’s another feature I’ll never use.  This time something caught my attention.  Somewhere towards the bottom of the page there were a few collages displayed with a teaser to Webify Me.  Basically if I answer 20 questions they will generate a personal collage of what the web means to me (or at least that is what I took it as).  What the hell, I had 10 minutes to spare and its cheaper than a shrink.  20 bizarre questions later Mozilla produced my “personal” assessment in terms of graphical icons… and here is the result:

Having looked at it, what are your first impressions?  My attention was immediately drawn to four things.  The rainbow bracelet was very disturbing and that feeling only amplified by the knitting needles.  Apparently they felt obligated to make fun of my nose, but that’s been old news since grade school but they nailed my interest in photography.  The first two observations were still glaring at me.  What the hell did I answer that indicated I was living an alternate lifestyle (obligatory “not that there is anything wrong with that”) and spent my evenings creating stocking hats.  My 10 minutes of spare time just turned into 30 minutes of investigation!  Eventually I figured out you could click on the individual images and get some verbiage on what it stood for.  Let’s just see what this is all about shall we?

Hit the review to read a rather detailed analysis of my Webify Me results

Continue reading Mozilla Thinks I’m a Gay Photographer Who Likes to Knit

Phoadtography: Checking Out Our Neighbors to the East (Part 3 of 2)

Ummm well, a funny thing happened on the way to Lightroom today. I stumbled on the missing set of Phoadtography pictures we took on our Indianapolis trip. I knew there were pictures of a couple of signs that stuck out on the trip, and by stuck out I mean we actually made a conscious effort to snap some pictures when we came back through the town. The mystery was solved when they showed up in a secondary file in our Lightroom catalog. As a result, this series actually grew by one (see Part 1 Link and Part 2 Link). Depending on how things are looking toward the end of the month this particular post may not get included in the quota requirement giving you a bonus (yeah) month. Do not get too excited, my record so far hasn’t exactly been too stellar… but in my best Dumb and Dumber .. “so you’re saying there’s a chance”.

On a personal front, I’m under a week to my big event – after 4 or 5 more miles, the worrying and fretting will begin.

Starting out the third and final (I promise) Indy Phoadtography set, I give you one of the three best sign shots from the trip.

Linda gets credit for spotting this and actually the ones below.  Of course, she kept pointing them out to me when we are under 2 car lengths from them making it nearly impossible to get a good Phoadtography shot.  The final A-Count on the sign shots ended up being 4.  That’s right, it took a whopping 4 attempts to actually get the shot (and as the case above, a crooked shot still).  How embarrassing.  I should send myself back to the minors.  At least the next shot in the sign series is at least straight.. a little degrading to men.. but still straight.

Not sure if the “Primitives” sign was just piling on the insults or it was a coincidence with the outdoor decor.   Someone at this particular Hucks has some serious issues or there is a friendly man vs woman jesting going on.  As we passed the sign from the front (okay, okay, it was the 4th time) I happened to notice the other side also had lettering on it so I snapped it.  My exposure was not set right causing it to be a on the blurry side but you can still make out the jab.

For the record, that is NOT a cop car parked suspiciously behind the sign.  It is just a large white car with a giant flag on it… I wonder if Hucks sells donuts? ack.. nevermind.

Hit the jump to see the rest of the pictures

Continue reading Phoadtography: Checking Out Our Neighbors to the East (Part 3 of 2)

Phoadtography: Checking Out Our Neighbors to the East (Pt 2 of 2)

Welcome to the 6th post for this month which successfully puts another check in the monthly post commitment and thankfully this one comes earlier than usual.  As you probably know I am usually rushing to get these babies done before day 30ish comes to a close.  Not this month, but that is primarily due to focusing on getting these done in order to spent the rest of the month (and some into the next month as well) focusing on a big personal event that is scheduled for September 11th.  Not really talking about it at the moment to keep from jinxing myself so we’ll just let that go for now.  On a side note, thanks to the ass Don Henley finding the need to come out in favor of the PROTECT IP Act (and using invalidated studies and hyperbole fear as a basis – must be learning from Gore), today marks the first day of never giving a penny to anything that funds the Eagles or Don Henley in any form.  This of course includes additional albums/CDs/DVDs to those already sitting in our shelves and god forbid anymore $75 tickets to their concerts.  Just my little way of helping make Donny-boy’s fake claims as real as I can – say, won’t you join me?

Enough ranting, you are hear for one and only one reason.. to fill the empty void when you found out there were even more phoadtography pictures from our Indy trip!  So, picking up where part one left off (link) I give you this sign found on a building as we were driving through a city.

Talk about a bad signage planning.  Reading this to someone would put them in a quandary.  Those Damn Pentecostals! or those Pentecostals are one Damn Ass Company.  If their lucky they would have seen the name of the city (Damasco) as they drove through.

As we drove into Indianapolis we spotted this hotel rising up above the trees.  From a design perspective it was pretty stunning and blended nicely with the environment.  Turns out our hotel was right near this Marriott and could have used it to navigate directly where we needed to be.  The construction around Indy had us uncertain we were on the right road and quite frankly the neighborhoods we were passing through had us a little concerned.  It all turned out okay, but simply heading for this landmark would have probably worked better.

Hit the jump to see the rest of the Indy Phoadtography Collection

Continue reading Phoadtography: Checking Out Our Neighbors to the East (Pt 2 of 2)

Another Check in the Bird List – The Scarlet Tanager

Can you tell I’m !#%!@@#$@ cooped up in the house this weekend with a hell spawned cold?  If memory serves (and it is on the fritz at the moment) this is the third post in three days.  Blogging at least keeps my mind off of the missed training runs this has caused which couldn’t happen at a more inconvenient time… but more on that in less than a month.  To be honest, today’s post is really more about a half check than a full check on the Life Birding List.  Linda and I headed out to a photo shoot at Wildcat Den about 30-40 minutes outside of Davenport in Muscatine County, Iowa.  We were in Davenport for our 3 day concert extravaganza (yes, that will be a future post topic) and figured it would be a good opportunity to take some shots at the State Park.  So we strapped on the backpacks, cleared out the memory cards and grabbed the cameras.  Needless to say with opportunities for wildlife, The Beast was in tow.

For the first hour there was not much action in the feathered category.  I decided to focus on some large butterflies while Linda busied herself with some water landscape shots.  From there we moved deeper into the State Park when Linda (so she says) pointed out a reddish bird sitting in the dense trees.  Having learned from previous mistakes, I dropped the tripod down and did my best to get a preliminary shot so I wouldn’t be leaving empty handed.  Once I had sufficient attempts  from afar, I slowly moved in to try and better the shot.  Out of all of them, this is probably the best one.

Hit the jump to see more pictures of this distinctive bird  … prepare yourself, some are a little scary

Continue reading Another Check in the Bird List – The Scarlet Tanager

Book Recollection: National Audobon Society Guide To Nature Photography

Ever start reading a book and come to the conclusion you might never actually finish it.  That is the exact situation I was in with today’s book recollection post.  Over three months ago I started reading National Audobon Society Guide to Nature Photography written by Tim Fitzharris.  Having perused the pictures in this particular book there was high expectations that the narrative would equal the stunning photos. And by stunning, I mean absolutely beautiful.  Turns out a number of Tim’s photos were actually scanned in from film with the added bonus of over 200 new digital photos (at least I think the new ones were all digital).  For those with access to the book, tops in my list was the image of a Marabou stork and African fish eagle fighting over a flamingo carcass.  That is now my benchmark for any photo session.  Another nice feature was he included the camera details for each of these shots providing some insights into how they were achieved.

As a quick background, this book was published by the National Audobon Society.  Interesting enough, their mission is to conserve and restore natural ecosystems, focusing on birds, other wildlife and their habitats for the benefit of humanity and the earth’s biological diversity.  It was first published in 1990with a revision in 2003.  This particular copy was a second printing 2011.  Supposedly this was updated for the digital age, but there are still missed references to the film days and the digital age has actually evolved a couple of levels since 2003 (for instance a gig card for a day’s shoot is looooong gone).  So what trumped all these great pictures?  The honest truth was the Tim’s writing style.  He deserves every credit he has ever received for his images, but his writing style tends to overplay the profession.   It is hard to identify exactly what it is about the narrative that annoyed me so much and therefore hard to really describe the issue here.  Instead, let me take a quote and let you form your own opinions.

“… No matter the result of your picture-taking efforts, the act itself serves as an example to family members, friends and even the larger community of a philosophy that marries abstraction with the elemental dictums of survival.”

Did you know the perfect line of system code (in Forth of course) eschews the very fiber that separates society from barbarianism and insure that humanity will always demonstrate the higher thought process once attributed only to the deities of religion?  I didn’t think you did .. ha.

You get my drift.  After about 10 pages of that I had to put it down before I witnessed the re-evolution of dinner, making the progression through the 207 pages quite difficult.  Eventually, the last page was turned.  Again, the pictures were quite impressive and there were some takeaways so it was not a waste by any means – although not a great return of tip per time read.  The scary thing is we already purchased a sister book from Tim focused on Landscape Photography.  We’ll just let that sit for awhile.

Hit the jump to see my takeaways.

Continue reading Book Recollection: National Audobon Society Guide To Nature Photography

“You Know … I Can’t Do Basic Math”

Cough howdy cough sneaze folks!  I have fallen victim to a summer plague given to me by a certain someone who will go namelindess.  As a result, most of my nights have been spent laying on the couch turning my brain to mush with reality TV – apparently this is the only programming on TV these days.  This has been extremely frustrating seeing as how it has prevented me from some important training runs.  The good news is my steady diet of vitamin C coupled with heavy doses of NyQuil have finally gained the upper hand.  Unfortunately, this hell spawn has reduced me to a short post today (besides, my posts of late have tended to be a little verbose so it is probably for the best).

Tonight’s post is as fresh as it gets folks.  This didn’t happen a year ago like my vacation posts, or even a month ago.  Nope, this entry is based on an experience that happened a mere 4 hours ago.  It isn’t so much one aspect of the event that caused my quandary as it is the contradictory logic involved.  Let’s get to the details shall we?  Linda likes to refer to me as Mr. PVC (actually that is probably one of the nicer monikers she uses).  This is due to the fact I tend to head straight for the white plastic whenever I need to translate a crazy idea into something tangible.  Take for example the Halloween decoration (link) or the latest example of the new bird feeder (link).  She nixed my idea of building our house out of the versatile product.  Needless to say, another project is at hand which involves the need to interchange certain parts.  A few hours in the PVC aisle solved the problem which included the three piece coupling pictured above.  A late design change (after a prototype flaw) required me to purchase 5 more of these couplings to perfect the design.  Not wanting to get confused with the half million (just a slight exaggeration) different coupling options available, I decided to take one of them into the store with me.

After work today, I decided to stop by the local Lowe’s store and finish the material purchases.  Conditioned by the annoying Walmart and Best Buy greeting system coupled with Sam’s Club’s “everyone that leaves the store is a thief” model has made me overly sensitive to causing a shoplifting accusation.  Big thanks to those three stores for making an honest person worry about this – all they need to do is add a TSA patdown when you come in and I’ll be turning Amish.  Holding my little coupler openly in my hand (picture above is almost lifesize), I waited in line at the return desk to get a sticker or something to indicate that I had already purchased it.  My turn came up and I held out my coupler and asked him if they needed to mark it.  The clerk looked at me and said “Oh no, we don’t sticker anything, just go right ahead”.  Ummm okay, that is both refreshing and concerning at the same time.  Hey, this company trusts me … or is it Hey, we have a sucker on the hook.  I decided to give them some credit and went with the former assessment.  Fifteen minutes later I had built the 5 new connectors and headed to the register.  I placed the couplers on the counter and made it clear to the clerk there were actually 10 end parts and 5 middle parts so again, no one thought I was trying to sneak something by them.  At the same time I showed her the one I had brought in and told her I brought that one in with me and put it in my front shirt pocket.  She didn’t hesitate a second and proceeded to ring up the 5 new couplers.  Wow, Lowe’s appears to have a well understood “trust the customer” policy.  There was probably a goofy grin on my face the whole time she was ringing up the items…. and then she hit the total button.

Hit the jump to read the rest about the rest of the experience.

Continue reading “You Know … I Can’t Do Basic Math”

Time to Print Another U.B. Shirt

Does anyone recall that wonderful day last year when yours truly was gloating about success at the local photography contest.  This major award (ummm, okay, it was just an honorable mention, but can you say F*R*A*G*EE*L*EE ).   This of course was followed soon by a devastating moment in my photographic history when my wife entered her GRluEAckT shot of a bee approaching a sunflower into another (smaller venue) local fair.  The outcome of that was a Best in Show for her efforts.  Although I did pretty well there as well, I had to accept my fate and put on the Umbrella B*tch shirt for the year.  Well, that was one long year folks and it was time to put it all on the line again.  First off was the HOI Fair (the larger venue I scored on the year before).  Sadly, we were both shut out at that event (everybody say “AHHHHHH”).  All was not lost for the Knox County Fair was soon to follow, but I was considered the underdog based on last year’s results.

Last week we headed out to the fair to see how our pictures did.  The fate of Umbrella B*tch was hinging on this event so we were both a little nervous.  Unfortunately for us, an awesome picture of a fox took the Best in Show.  Our hats off to that photographer for a fantastic job.   We definitely do not mind losing to quality (now that out of focus B&W at the HOI… well, that’s a different story).    So now the HOI event was taken out of the decision process and the Best in Show was nixed.  The good news is we ended up doing quite well in a number of categories.  In fact, Linda and I each took two first places.

Linda scored with her Zion (I think that is where it was taken) water silk and her portrait she took at her niece’s wedding reception.  Ironically, she really didn’t think that shot was that great, but I really like the composition and you can’t tell it in this shot, but there is some grain to it that goes well with the period shot.  Apparently the judges agreed with me.  I took first for my winter cardinal shot and a macro shot I took of a praying mantis.  That cardinal shot finally gets some appreciation ( it is probably one of my favorite shots with the red of the bird contrasting nicely with the snow around it).  Linda paid back the favor on the praying mantis.  I was unsure about entering that macro, but Linda really liked it and forced me to enter it – I owe her a thanks.  With each of us getting two first places finishes, that U.B. decision criteria was thrown out too.

Hit the link to read to see how the 2011 U.B. decision process plays out

Continue reading Time to Print Another U.B. Shirt

Phoadtography: Checking Out Our Neighbors to the East (Pt 1 of 2)

Recently Linda and I were able to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary.  We are still planning our real celebration vacation (later in the year) but we decided it would be fun to just get away for a few days and relax a little.  This was a little hampered due to the Bix 7 race which was set for the end of the month but figured the taper down week would work perfectly – catch 2 shorter training runs on the road and I’d be good to go.  The next issue at hand was deciding where to go.  My constant hints of Vegas were eventually trumped by a trip to the Indianapolis Zoo followed by a stay at French Lick Indiana.  This way we could pack the cameras and catch a few state parks along the way … oh, and French Lick has a casino as well.  More importantly, what does any road trip provide the opportunity for?  Did you say PHOADTOGRAPHY?!?  How right you are.  A quick note, this time I stepped up my game a little and shot entirely on manual mode.  It makes it a little more challenging when you are trying to get the aperture and shutter speed right for the proper exposure while cruising down the highway at 65… well more like 75+ if Linda is driving.  So yes, there are some less than crisp shots, but overall I am pretty happy with the results.  (in honesty, it was additional training to making the switch from bird on a stick to a bird in flight which is damn hard in the field)

Enough banter.. show us the shots

We were heading into Indianapolis and decided to top off the tank.  You never know what the gas prices might be as you near the bigger cities, however, for some reason Peoria is always on the high end of the gas anyway.  As we were heading back onto the highway I noticed this sign which summed up this leg of the trip perfectly.

Hit the jump to see the rest of the great (okay, that may be subjective) pictures from the road.

Continue reading Phoadtography: Checking Out Our Neighbors to the East (Pt 1 of 2)

Number 9 Number 9 Number 9…

Wow, it is getting down to the wire when I have to resort to a Beatles song for a blog title.  Think of it more of a mocking gesture like when I attend birthday parties and continually tell people “Well it’s my birthday too, yeah”…Yes, I dislike that band.  Anyway, it is literally one day left in the month and I have one post to go to make my quota.  Fortunately for me, I already had this topic planned and just needed make sure I had 5 posts in before today.  It may have been planned, but I needed to successfully complete something first.  If you have been around the blog for at least a few years you know the end of July brings a very important event for me in the running schedule.  The BIX7 race was held in Davenport IA this morning and I was there wearing my racing orange.

Linda took my traditional pre-race picture and I must say I look a lot happier than I did for the Steamboat Race.  I can contribute a lot of that happiness to not having a bad hamburger the night before.  In fact, we made doubly sure nothing like the night before Steamboat happened again.   Instead,  Linda made my favorite spaghetti recipe rather than risk  another carry out catastrophe.  In the past, this has been the race I’ve trained for all year.  Normally I would be peaking at 8 miles the week before the race with plenty of hill work and a healthy dose of 5K speed runs to get the leg turnover I wanted.  That was not the case this year due to a Life List event planned for later in the year that is pretty much getting my full training attention.  This year I lined up with a completely retooled body.  I probably hit the line at around 153 pounds as a result of a planned shedding over 12 pounds of weight since late last year (click here if you want details on some of the loss).  With the weight off I could focus on resetting the body to meet the demands of the future event.  This brought me to a peak of 12.3 miles but at the cost of my previous speed, losing at least a minute per mile on average.  With all that considered along with the Bix@6 training run earlier in July the initial projections was to come in around the 63 minute mark…. ummmmm that didn’t end up happening.

Hit the jump to read details of the race and see the all important post race pictures.

Continue reading Number 9 Number 9 Number 9…