Racket Peanut Steering

I have always considered the 26th of December to be one of the strangest days of the year.  The day after christmas.  After nearly 3 months of everyone preparing for this holiday (which I think is insane) it's all over before you know it.  

This was a very weird Christmas for me.  A little over a month ago my grandma Kellman was at Garden City Hospital.  She had to stay for a few days until she got better.  For the past few years she had been living with my Aunt Lisa and her family.  While she was in the hospital she told my dad that she had never known anyone more negative than my aunt, uncle, and cousin and expressed great desire of not wanting to continue living there.  So my dad volunteered our house.  A couple weeks later the computer and desk was hauled down to the basement and grandma moved into the computer room.  

On Monday, the 22nd, Grandma was complaining of intense pain in her chest and dad decided to call for an ambulance.  Dad and I though maybe she broke her ribs from falling into the bathtub while flushing the toilet the night before.  That turned out to just be bruising.  However, within hours of being at St. Joes, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.  So at this point, it has been determined that Garden City Hospital sucks.  Because grandma has been going there for years and they never saw this?  Grandma's also been battling heart disease and diabetes for a while.  It's been determined that she had this cancer for quite a long time since it's spread all over.  So at this point they're just going to give her pain killers and let the diseases do their work.  Grandma's in good spirits and is very glad to finally know what's going on.

Christmas Eve consisted of the Kellman side of the family going up and visiting Grandma for a while and then meeting at our place for pizza.  That was a pretty great time.  One of my favourite things is being in a room with my aunts and uncles as they tell stories from their childhood.  

In Grandma's room was a dry erase board with a little information along with "Plan for the day" and "Activities."  This hadn't been updated since the 22nd so we all came up with some ideas... rather ridiculous ideas of items to add to the board and see if anyone notices.  Many laughs were had.  (The original Plan for the Day was "Feel Better.")

Christmas Morning was the first in 12 years where I could sleep in, and it was wonderful.  My parents and I went to 10am mass and then came home and exchanged gifts.  It was a rather low budget exchange this year.  I got my parents a few dvds and mom got her box of chocolates.  I got a Simpsons tree ornament, a box of Double Bubble, and some money.

That night, the Place side of the family came over.  That's always a good time.  Luke brought over a whole bag of toys that he got and played with them in the piano room most of the time.  Towards the end of the night he wanted me to play with him, which I did for a good hour.  It was fun.  He got pretty upset though when it came time to leave.  It was a little cute to me, I must admit.

So to sum things up, avoid Garden City Hospital.  They suck.

Lately I've been toying with the idea of possibly getting a new internal hard drive for my laptop.  There's nothing wrong with the one that's in my laptop now... other than the fact that it's only 95GB.  That's pretty small, for me.  I have over 60 gigs of music and an ever growing library of photos.  Because of their massive size, I keep my music and photo libraries on a separate 500 gig external hard drive.  It would be nice to actually have everything physically on my laptop, that way I wouldn't have to cary this little hard drive around.  So I've been thinking of possibly getting an internal laptop drive that's at least 500 gigs.  But I don't really want to go through the process of having to reinstall everything and such... I don't know.  We'll see what happens.

Triple points for the one who tells me the reference the title is from.  Show and episode.  And who said it.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Useless Knowledge

"The female pigeon cannot lay eggs if she is alone. In order for her ovaries to function, she must be able to see another pigeon. If no other pigeon is available, her own reflection in a mirror will suffice. Very narcissistic!"

That's the weirdest thing I've ever read... maybe.

OCD

I recently installed Adobe Photoshop CS4 on my laptop.  Up to this point I had been using Adobe Photoshop Elements for my major photo editing.  So now that I primarily use CS4, I replaced Elements on my dock.  I'm a little disappointed though.  I have my moments of o.c.d. and this one kicked in the second I replaced Elements on my dock with CS4.  

Let's see if anyone can guess why I would be bugged by this.  Tom cannot answer this.  He already did before I made this post.

Image one:

Image two:

Hell yeah!

It was the Christmas special too.

Holy cow!  Bush almost got hit by a shoe!

I just realized that Christmas is next week, and we don't have a tree yet.

Lots going on.  It's funny, since The Dark Knight has been at Briarwood... I've yet to go see it there.  I've never really had much of a chance to.

Bethany's birthday was last week.  The 10th.  She's 24 now.  I woke up at the butt crack of dawn, went over to her place and made her breakfast before she left for work.  Pancakes, sausage, and scrambled eggs with cheese.

I felt a little bad because after that, she really didn't want to go to work.  Way more so than usual.  She took a tiny nap before she left.  She left for work and I stayed to clean the dishes and put her birthday present in her bathroom.  An orange toilet lid cover with a matching rug.  She loves it.  

My parents and I recently moved my Grandma Kellman in.  Before she moved in, my dad, uncle Keith and I moved stuff around to prepare for the move.  We turned the computer room into Grandma's room.  We had a lot of stuff in the basement taking up space.  Most of that is sitting in the garage until a decision is made on what to do with that stuff.  The computer and heavy-as-hell desk was moved to the basement.  I guess the plan is to have grandma stay with us until my dad and his sisters find an assisted living place for her.

My boss at the studio has got to be one of the most full-of-shit individuals I have ever met.  About a month ago my hours were cut because business has been a bit slow.  So instead of going in Monday through Thursday from 1-5, I don't go in on Wednesdays anymore.  It sucks, not just because it means a thinner paycheck, but there's actually a lot of shit I still need to finish: Design a 30 page wedding album, edit and post on the website photos from a recent family shoot, re order preschool pictures of 2 kids where the kids faces are "blown out" (over exposed highlights) which is bullshit, I think they're just fine.  I had a ton of other stuff that need to get done but I was able to get that all done last week.  The wedding album i need to get done before the weeks end... because Judy is full of shit.  The mother of the bride came in last week to pick up a bunch of prints that she and various other family members / friends had ordered and asked judy when a rough draft of the album would be completed.  Judy told her it'd be ready next week (being this week) and when i heard her say that, I banged my head on the desk, because thanks to all the other shit I had to do, I hadn't even started designing the album yet.  I managed to get 5 pages done during work yesterday.  And I still need to edit that family shoot.  I was hoping to get those online this week but that ain't happening.  

And Judy doesn't know shit about photography.  I'm pretty sure laura would happily agree with me on that.

So with my hours being cut at the studio, I told my supervisor at best buy that i'm available to work more hours, which, unfortunately hasn't quite worked out how I wanted.  Before I was working tuesday and friday truck shifts and closing on sundays.  I updated my availability so that I can now close on wednesday nights as well.  Hasn't really worked out that way because now I'm only scheduled to close on either Sunday or Wednesday.  Though this past Sunday sucked a lot because I was only scheduled for 4 hours.  1-5.  We closed at 10.  Granted it was nice to get out early and spend the rest of my Sunday with Bethany, especially since it was crazy busy and I was running all over the place the entire shift fulfilling dot com orders and doing caryouts, but i need money, which means i need more hours.  

This turned out to be a far longer post than what I was expecting.

I've decided that I want a replica of Tiger Stadium for Christmas.  I shall tell my parents tomorrow.

That's another thing.  I still have christmas shopping to do.  Dad's easy.  He usually wants movies, and this year proves to be no different.  I have an idea on what to get mom.  I haven't a clue on what to get Bethany, and "I don't know" in response to "What do you want?" doesn't help.

A message to those going 65mph in the fast lane...

Speed the fuck up!  You're going the same speed as the semi next to you!

Building Steam with a Grain of Salt

This is a little bit of an update post since it's been a while.I probably should have made a post before Thanksgiving about my dad participating in Detroit's Thanksgiving Parade.  He drove a Model T of course.

Well at least he smiled on television.

On the way to the parade we drove past Tiger Stadium.  I always get rather emotional inside when ever I see what's left of the stadium.  On the way home I asked my mom to pull over so I could get a couple images, because I've been wanting to pay another visit for a while but never had much of a chance to.

On the way to the parade

On the way home

It makes me really sad.  I know it sounds

silly but she definitely holds a piece of my heart.

A few weeks ago, my cousin Lauren gave birth to her second baby, Noah.  I finally got to meet my godson when we went over to my aunt's house for Thanksgiving dinner.  He's so cute.

Work at Best Buy has been crazy busy the couple weeks before Thanksgiving, obviously for Black Friday.  On truck nights (Tuesday and Friday nights), I'm in charge of putting away all of the lock-up items.  That's laptops, mp3 players, still and video cameras, cell phones, and GPS's.  I'm normally scheduled 7pm - 2am.  There's an overnight shift that comes in usually around midnight.  Now, I don't like to leave until I finish putting away all of the lock up, and the 4 trucks before thanksgiving, we've been getting so much stuff (note 400+ GPS compared to the average 10 - 20) that I wouldn't leave until around 4 in the morning.  The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I didn't leave until 5:30.  You better believe i'm expecting a hefty paycheck.  I've told a few people about my late nights and they're like "damn," and i realized that I failed to mention that they're not scheduling me till 5:30, that I choose to stay that late.  Because technically i can leave at 2.

The Dark Knight is at Briarwood...

If anyone needs me, you know where I'll be...

It's the End of the World As We Know It... And I Feel Fine

I'm going to start off by saying that I am absolutely pleased with the results of the election.  Obama won the presidency and proposal 2 passed.  However, I can't get over the ridiculous over reaction of McCain supporters.  Some of the status' on facebook I've seen lately have made me shake my head:

Joe watched in silence as a nation fell, slaughtering it's own people, stealing from the accomplished, putting skin color above intelligence, and sacrificing hope.

Joseph feels very very sick. The state of Michigan is officially evil, and the U.S. is in trouble.

Mary is sick to my stomach over this. We are in huge trouble. God, have mercy on our country.

Now, most of the negative status' that I've seen are from the single issue (abortion) voters.  So because prop 2 passed and we elected a president who doesn't have the most ideal views on abortion, there is no hope in the country and we're doomed?  There's people who seriously believe Barak is going to put on a turban, and that he will let the terrorists into our country and everyone will get shot.  Really now?  Come on.

I was at work today taking a little break surfing facebook when out of nowhere, a guy I used to play baseball with popped out of nowhere on facebook chat:

Matt

why did you want proposal 2 to pass

2:59pmDavid

the possibility that it can find cures

3:00pmMatt

but they will kill babies to do it

3:01pmDavid

"Embryonic stem cells are derived from embryos by in vitro fertilization. A greater number of embryos are produced than are necessary or suitable for implantation resulting in "excess" embryos."...

""Fertility patients have four options for these embryos," said Jill Roof, CRC research associate. "They can store them, donate them to others seeking fertility treatment, discard them as medical waste, or donate them to research. If Proposal 2008-02 passes, Michigan scientists will be able to conduct research using donated embryos and derive their own embryonic stem cells rather than relying on those from other states that may not meet their needs." (http://www.crcmich.org/election/index.html)"

3:02pmMatt

not all of the embryos will be from vitro fertilization

besides that wont those still become babies too

3:04pmDavid

what makes you so sure that not all are from in vitro fertilization?

3:04pmMatt

I just know that abortion is legal so what do you think they are going to do with all of the embryos

3:06pmDavid

taken from the proposed constitutional amendment:

b) The human embryos were created for the purpose of fertility treatment
and, with voluntary and informed consent, documented in writing, the
person seeking fertility treatment chose to donate the embryos for
research; and
(i) the embryos were in excess of the clinical need of the person
seeking the fertility treatment and would otherwise be discarded
unless they are used for research; or
(ii) the embryos were not suitable for implantation and would otherwise
be discarded unless they are used for research.

so, they're only coming from donations.

3:07pmMatt

just because it says it in the ammendment doesnt mean that is the only way they will get them

what if they are donated from an abortion clinic

3:10pmMatt

I dont know it just kind of scares me

3:10pmDavid

The proposed constitutional amendment would:...

• Provide that stem cells cannot be taken from human embryos more than 14 days after cell
division begins.
• Prohibit any person from selling or purchasing human embryos for stem cell research.
• Prohibit state and local laws that prevent, restrict or discourage stem cell research, future
therapies and cures.

emphasis on the 14 days after cell division part

3:11pmMatt

but does that mean before the 14 days that it wont become a human

it still would become a human

3:12pmDavid

i'm not arguing with that. That just pretty much seals the deal that they're not coming from abortion clinics.

3:12pmMatt

ok

3:13pmDavid

my argument on the whole thing is that it's better than just tossing the embryos that aren't being used.

so they're not going to be growing anyways

3:14pmMatt

Where do these discarded embryos come from anyways

3:14pmDavid

"Embryonic stem cells are derived from embryos by in vitro fertilization. A greater number of embryos are produced than are necessary or suitable for implantation resulting in "excess" embryos."...

3:15pmMatt

oh I see what you are saying

I just dont see why they dont use adult stem cells

3:17pmMatt

they havent found any cures from embryonic stem cell research

3:17pmDavid

yet

3:18pmMatt

i think they are too unstable

3:18pmDavid

you gotta keep in mind that science is ever advancing. Just because they haven't found anything yet doesn't mean they should give up.

3:18pmMatt

I just am scared that they will start doing the vitro fertilization for this purpose

only

i know it says the left over ones

Now really people.  I think you need to do a bit more of an argument than "It's killing babies."  Otherwise you just look like a fool when you toss out a "fact" (Embryos are coming from abortion clinics) that gets shot down with an actual fact (aborted embryos are unsuitable for research and they're coming from fertility clinics).  

"I just don't see why they don't use adult stem cells"

They do use adult stem cells currently in research, but adult stem cells come from bone marrow and are already more "specialized" stem cells that can only become blood cells but the embryonic ones can become anything that's why they're more useful. (Thanks Bethany.)

All I can say is that I don't anticipate the Apocalypse will be happening anytime soon.

Legend of Dr. Brainworm

I was disturbed greatly today.  In church of all places.  I guess I should have expected it though.  At one of the entrances of church, you couldn't help but notice the sign screaming out in silence "2 goes 2 far."   Inside the weekly bulletin was an insert in f.a.q. format explaining why (according to catholic teachings) "2 goes 2 far."  At this point I'm just disappointed and upset.  Here's the part that really disturbed me.  The second question : "Aren't the embryos just going to be thrown away?  Why not use them for research?"

To which their response was: "This argument is simply invalid. (wtf?)  For it to be consistent, society would then have to deem as disposable the terminally ill and condemned prisoners."  Behold, one element I hate about gung-ho catholics.  I feel this answer is insanely invalad and i'll explain why later.  They go on to say: "Using" the human embryos does not accurately describe human embryonic stem cell research.  The reality is that the researcher willingly destroys the living human embryo in order to extract the embryo's stem cells.  Besides, the fact that an embryonic human being is at risk of being abandoned by his or her parents does not give the government the right to destroy that infant human life.  The argument fails to consider the long-term consequences of human embryo research.  When the very limited number of human embryos have been destroyed, from where will the additional embryos come?  The answer, as witnessed in both California and England, is egg extraction, a process that is extremely painful for women and opens the door for the exploitation of minorities, the poor and the most vulnerable.  Embryo destructive research is neither pro-life nor consistent with the Church's teaching on social justice."

They make it sound like they just flat out take eggs from women against their will.  What's with the blowing things out of proportion?

Read: Embryonic stem cells are derived from embryos by in vitro fertilization. A greater number of embryos are produced than are necessary or suitable for implantation resulting in "excess" embryos.

"Fertility patients have four options for these embryos," said Jill Roof, CRC research associate. "They can store them, donate them to others seeking fertility treatment, discard them as medical waste, or donate them to research. If Proposal 2008-02 passes, Michigan scientists will be able to conduct research using donated embryos and derive their own embryonic stem cells rather than relying on those from other states that may not meet their needs." (http://www.crcmich.org/election/index.html)

Now here's the part where I (try) to explain how the response to the "invalid argument" is in itself invalid.  Now keep in mind that I'm flat out against the act of abortion, so that makes me pro-life, right?  Now, what's one thing a major difference between human embryonic stem cells and the terminally ill?  Well you see, most of the terminally ill people were conceived in the womb through the act of sexual intercourse.  Let's label this as "natural."  Human embryonic stem cells are conceived in a petri dish.  Let's label this as "unnatural."  Do you see where I'm going with this?  Because I can't find the words to explain this in detail.

I also want to take this time to state my view on abortion.  I'm against it.  100%.  I think it's very unfortunate that women have them.  I don't mean to sound like i think they just go out and have them for the sake of having them.  I know that's not true.  But I am against them 100%.  Here's the kicker though.  I don't believe the catholic church nor the government should interfere with a woman's decision to have one.  Up until a few months ago I was against it just because that's what the church has been telling me all my life.  I recently read a quote that enabled me to finally grow the balls to actually think for myself: "Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion  violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all. -Barack Obama, June 28th 2006, Washington DC

Christianity isn't the only religion out there.

Guess that doesn't make me pro-life anymore... for some reason.

The more and more I think about it, the more Catholics and Christians tick me off.  Not all catholics and christians, let's be realistic here.  Many of them are really great people.  I'm talking about the single issue gung-ho ones, the ones who are going to vote for McCain just because of his position on abortion.  Do they seriously thing that if he is elected, he's going to change the law to ban abortion?  Because he isn't.  There's a very small part of me that wishes he would win just so that when nothing has changed at the end of his term, i can say "Told you so."  You could have a presidential candidate, the worst in the world who's like "Bomb every country, raise taxes! Spend Spend Spend!  Drill Everywhere!  Burn money!" and of course no one would like him.  But once he says the 3 magic words "I'm Pro-Life," he's got 90% of the gung-ho catholics.

This is perhaps my first post ever in my life with a very high potential of pissing people off.

About a month ago I did a product shoot for a company known as "Hell's Foundry" that specialize in motorcycle stuff. I photographed a motorcycle dashboard with emphasis on their leather finish, which is apparently a big thing now, or something. I know nothing about motorcycles so I don't really know. Anyways, i recently discovered that one of the photos that I took is being used on their website.  I'm pretty happy about it, a photo of mine being used on a commercial website.  

Here's the original image:

And here's how they spiced it up for their site:

Pretty great, right?

Life is good...

This is what happens to tires when the front end is out of alignment for a really long time.  Eventually, you'll get a hole and massive amounts of air will leak out of this hole until there is no more air to be leaked.  They will last a hell of a lot longer when your front end is aligned.  In the words of my dad, "They were not ready to be worn out. [pauses to think about what he just said] I'm starting to sound like a politician."

Two good signs that your front end needs alignment:

1) physical signs of ware on your tires

2) massive vibrations of the steering wheel when traveling at speeds over 70mph.

On a lighter note, i paid only $2.09 for gas.  Twenty-five dollars filled up the tank.  It was wonderful.

I'm going to bed.

So what if I'm a nerd?

Think back to the days of the Nintendo 64.  One of the greatest games of all time was Goldeneye 007.  That game had so much to offer.  Great graphics (at the time), great sound effects, and awesomely catchy music.  I played that game so much in 6th and 7th grade that I discovered and memorized the pattern of the grunts when you shot people.  

Fast forward to now.  Last week during work i randomly got a song from one of the levels stuck in my head.  I have no idea how, since I haven't played / heard the music in ages.  I told Tom about this, and my plans of someday recording all the music from Goldeneye to my iTunes library.  Tom then directed my attention to a web site that has the music for many video games in mp3 format.  Long story short, I'm listening to the music of Goldeneye 007 right now and damn is it ever taking me back.

Glass

White Lines

Black Lines

I hate the names of new baseball stadiums.  When I hear the name of a stadium, i want to think about the team, not the bank or store that it's named after.  The New York Mets played their final season at Shea Stadium.  They will be kicking off the 2009 season at their new home, Citi Field.  When I learned this, I hated it so much that i decided to write this post about how much I despise new ballpark names.  So what's so special about the Yankees that their new stadium is still Yankee Stadium?  

Other vapid stadium names include the following: (Names in parenthesis are the cooler parks the new ones replaced)

     *Chase Field (no previous park), home to the Arizona Diamondbacks

     *U.S. Cellular Field (Comiskey Park), home to the Chicago White Sox

     *Progressive Field (Cleveland Stadium), home of the Cleveland Indians

     *Comerica Park (Tiger Stadium), home of the Detroit Tigers

     *Minute Maid Park (Astrodome), home of the Houston Astros

     *Citizens Bank Park (Veterans Park), home of the Philadelphia Phillies

     *PETCO Park (Qualcomm Stadium), home of the San Diego Padres

     *AT&T Park (Candlestick Park), home of the San Francisco Giants

     *Safeco Field (The Kingdome), home of the Seattle Marlins

There are some names I can deal with.  Miller Park, for example, which is the home of the Milwaukee Brewers.  Brewers (real ones, not the baseball team) brew beer.  Miller is a beer, that's what I can handle that one.  Same goes for Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies.  Oddly enough, another "beer" stadium.  I'm ok with it because Coors is made in Colorado.

In 2010, the Minnesota Twins will no longer play their home games at Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.  Their home games will be played at Target Field.  Lame.  

All these new business named fields just don't sit well at all with me.  They certainly can't beat the more original names like Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Fenway Park, or Tiger Stadium.  And it really saddens me that Tiger Stadium was replaced with a bank stadium.

And for the record, the award for best stadium name goes to where the Cincinnati Reds played from 1902 - 1911... Palace of the Fans.  Tiger Stadium doesn't count because that will always be the best to me.

Construction Time Again...

I have just spent the past few days organizing the hell out of my iTunes music library.  10,899 songs, over 32 days worth of music... it took a while to do.  This is O.C.D. Dave at its finest.  I went through to make sure every album had the correct art work.  Secondly, there were various multi "disc" albums in my ligrary, in which the title would include [Disc 1] and [Disc 2].  I went through all of those and got rid of the bracketed text in the titles and merged them into their separate albums.

There's also 64 albums that are not really albums, but mixes that I received from my brother, Andy, many years ago.  I grouped those into their own thing so when you browse through the individual artists, only the albums they released would appear and not 1 or however many songs from those mixes that Andy made.  That probably took the longest to do, and was the first task that I did.  I started doing that, probably a year ago one night but then didn't do any more until last week.  That took a couple days to complete.

The final task was correcting all the genres.  I never really paid any attention to that until recently when an update in iTunes took away the ability to hide the genres.  So I spent a few hours fixing all the genres that were messed up from information that was gathered when importing from a cd or downloading from the internet.  "Beck" is not a genre and neither is the number 17.  

Now that I have finally finished doing all of this, it is not time for me to backup my entire library on my backup drive and reload my iPod.  I'll just let those tasks run over night.

Party Time Is Here Again...

anyone who knows me well knows that depeche mode is one of my top favourite bands.  and if you're one of those people that knows me well, then you'll understand how excited i am for this coming monday when depeche mode are going to hold a press conference to announce what's to come in the next year or so.  it is expected that they are going to be announcing a new album and possibly a world tour, and you know that i'm getting their new album the day it is released, and you know that i am going to be in attendance when they make a stop in detroit, whenever that'll be.

MDSNResponder no such file or directory

had a bit of a scare over the past 24 hours.  my laptop wasn't starting up.  i'd turn it on and the grey screen would come up with the apple logo and that was it, even after 45 minutes.  now i didn't sit in front of my laptop for 45 minutes watching the grey screen.  i was doing a bit of research at this time figuring out how to fix this problem.  after plowing through the support forums on apple.com i tried various things.  about a week ago i had installed some memory so maybe perhaps that was causing the problem.  so i removed the newly installed memory and turned on the laptop but it was not booting up.  that wasn't causing the problem so i put the memory back in.  i tried resetting the system management controller but that didn't work.  i tried resetting the NVRAM but again, that didn't do anything.  running the laptop through the disk utility on the home computer didn't do anything either.  at this point i decided to give up for the night because bethany was over and i know she didn't want to watch me try and fix my laptop all night.

so here we are today, woke up and went right back at trying to figure out what's wrong with my laptop.  i booted it up in verbose mode, which shows what it's doing when it's starting up, like this:

everything was looking fine until it showed a couple errors and kept repeating every 5 seconds

MDSNResponder no such file or directory

MDSNResponder no such file or directory

MDSNResponder no such file or directory

so i typed that into google and found a forum where someone was having the same problem and 

figured out how to fix it. it was an error with the file sharing on the hard drive. I must have 

accidently changed one of the settings from "read and write" to "read only" and that was causing 

the start up to freeze. the person on the forum explained how he fixed his problem while in single 

user mode, which is like verbose mode but you can input commands. his way of doing it was a bit

too confusing to me but i came up with a much easier way of fixing the problem. i turned my laptop

on in target disk mode, which basically turns the laptop into an external hard drive, and plugged it

into the home computer. i pulled up the info window for the laptop hard drive and sure enough, one

of the settings was set to "read only":

i simply reset it to "read & write," ejected the laptop from the computer, turned it off and turned it back on and sure 'nuff, it started up just fine.  this made me pretty darn happy because i was beginning to worry that i was going to need a new laptop.  i was beginning to think that maybe the hard drive died or it was a problem with the logic board or something major like that.  luckly this was not the case!

The Future Never Happened...

i've been doing a lot of thinking lately about the future.  you know, the whole "where do you see yourself in 10 years?" thing.  well as i'm getting older i'm becoming more and more sure with how i want to make money for the rest of my life.  right now i'm a part time photographer at a portrait studio in brighton.  i might not like certain elements of the job at the present time but overall, i pretty much love this job and am extremely lucky to have a job like this straight out of college.  

in my last semester in the photography program at wcc, one of my classes focused on preparing you for what's to come, wether that be assisting at a studio or starting your own photography business and such.  i geared towards the assistant part mainly because i really didn't have a clue at that time with what i wanted to do.  now here i am 5 months after graduating and i'm developing (hahaha) a better grasp on what direction i want to go in life and working at this studio has played a huge role in that.  

so what is it that i want to do?  well, pretty much what i'm doing now, except my way.  i want to run my own studio.  i want to shoot seniors, weddings, maybe do team pictures, like for little league baseball teams or something.  i also want to do my own little thing on the side,fine art  photography like random shit and landscapes and such.  maybe do an art fair here and there to display that stuff.

also, later on down the road, after i've been in business for a while, maybe go into teaching photography.

let's see how the next 10 years shape out.

Fun With Stickies!

This here has to be the most amazing videos I've ever seen!

EepyBird's Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

Lights!

There's a pretty good feeling that covers me whenever I impress my boss at the studio with different lighting setups.  Let's just say that WCC taught me well.  When I first started at the studio, I wasn't impressed with how they lit their subjects.  99% of everything they shot in the studio was shot using two strobes in front of the subject: (I can't draw, that's why i'm a photographer)

Which resulted in a shot like this:

After a couple months, my co-worker Jen left for another job and my current co-worker Laura was hired.  The first senior I shot, I shot like any other senior was shot, using the same dull front lighting.  I started shooting my third senior and I just decided that I had enough with it and decided to do something different.  So I unplugged one of the strobes and took the other one and placed it right next to my subject and placed a reflection panel on the other side:

Which resulted in this:

Judy, my boss, was extremely impressed when I showed her the following day.  "It almost looks like a painting!" she exclaimed.  I would have liked it more if I had used a hair light to separate her a little more from the background, but that the time I felt that we didn't really have a good hair light.  I figured what we had would have been overpowering.  I wanted something like what I had used at wcc, to decrease some of the intensity.  

I shot a senior yesterday and I had a "what if" moment.  I really wanted to use a hair light so I said to myself "what if I actually did use this light as a hair light?

The result was very pleasing to me:

Judy hasn't seen this one yet but I'm sure she's going to be very impressed when she does.  

I knew I was easily capable of producing images far more appealing that what was originally being done and I'm pretty proud of myself for doing something about it.  My mom says I've made a nice transition from shooting senior pictures to shooting senior portraits.

I almost got into an accident with a semi on my way home from best buy.  I was going down 94 coming up to the guy getting ready to pass him and I don't know if he was drunk or fell asleep but he starts kind of moving all over the place, suddenly going into the left lane, back to the right, then going between lanes and such... it freaked me out a little bit.

This has been one of those night where I just wanna dance around like Gil Mantera...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaUs2rOmmcM