Understanding Exposure

As many of you know, (it's funny how I say many regarding the 5 people that read this) I have lately been fumbling my way around a Canon Rebel XSi. Now, granted, I have been able to snap some pretty neat looking photos considering my knowledge base, but I have felt that I'm missing a great deal of what my camera can do. I have been aimlessly snapping photos and messing with settings. Typically I will shoot for an hour or two, take hundreds of photos and end up with 5-10 that actually look good. NO MORE! For Christmas, my sister gave me a book called "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson. This book is awesome. I'm maybe two chapters into it and already I feel so much more confident with my camera. I've read several articles on the interwebs and parts of a couple of books but this one blows them all away. Most of what I have read up to this point deals in lots of numbers and tries to make things overly complicated while overlooking some of the really basic functions of the camera. This book really breaks it down from a very basic standpoint and basically takes you by the hand and says, "Look, this is how it works." It is fantastic. I'm so excited to take my new-found knowledge into the real world and start taking some awesome pictures. I need the sun to come up already!!

Vomit Blog #1

This could be kind of interesting. I've found since I started blogging that I've had lots of ideas that I wanted to write down that I didn't feel necessarily warranted their own blog post. So, I'm creating what I have decided to call the vomit blog. I'm just going to list all of these random thoughts. I think starting now I'll keep a running vomit blog and post it occasionally as it fills up. So here we go with vomit blog #1.

1. The reason there are very few pictures of drummers is because it's extremely difficult to do. They're moving fast, the lights on the stage are not placed optimally to get light on the drummer and it's very hard to get enough light on them to get a good picture and have an exposure time fast enough not to be a blurry mess. A lot of that could have to do with my crappy lens. :P I'll keep trying.

2. Every time I see someone speeding and driving like a jack ass I wish that they would run into a concrete barrier. It pisses me off that people feel like where ever they have to be is far more important than the safety of everyone on the road. Also, I am constantly amazed at how pissed off people get at other drivers who are actually going the speed limit.

3. In order to avoid all of the stupid warnings we have to put on everything to keep the idiots of the world safe, every product package should have the following statement; "By opening this product you assume responsibility  for any and all risks of use/misuse of this product by you and any others using/misusing the product. Manufacturer makes no guarantee of the product's safety."
Seriously, put it on everything. Let the idiots of the world strangle themselves with lamp cords. We'll be better off in the end.

4. People need to either be more careful or more thorough when putting qualifiers on multiple choice questions. What if my answer is somewhere between "A.  Yes, I fucking LOVE chocodiles" and "B. No, I am really damn sure I asked for pecan sandies." Either stick with just yes/no or make sure you include "C. Yes, I would enjoy a chocodile, but in truth I did ask for pecan sandies." 

A step in the wrong direction

Under normal circumstances I’m am fairly strongly against focusing on negativity. In this particular case, I feel like it is very important to me to dedicate one post to this. I need to make sure I highlight the problem so I make sure that I see it. I also worry that if I included this in a typical post it would seem like I was trying to cover up the problem, both to the reader and to myself.
I smoked this weekend; more than a couple. As you may have read in a previous blog, I have struggled primarily with not smoking while at social functions, especially when alcohol is involved. Rather than thinking of a way to deal with this problem and take care of it, I chose, instead, to embrace the problem and let it grow. I decided that there was no way I was going to not smoke while drinking and that in an effort not to be mooching cigarettes all night that I would just buy a pack so I only had to deal with the guilt of smoking and not the guilt of taking cigarettes from people. The plan was to smoke until the end of the night at which time I would give the remainder of the pack to someone else. This worked relatively well on Friday night. I smoked maybe half of a pack and, at the end of the evening, gave it away to another friend that smoked. This seemed all well and good to me. I had my cigarettes for the night of drinking and at the end of the night, they were gone and I could pretend that I was still a happy non-smoker.
Then Saturday night came around and to my surprise, I found myself out drinking with some friends again. I hadn’t planned on this and of course, I had to have another partial pack. So I went and bought one. I did it last night, and truthfully, a prior evening a few weeks ago. Why wouldn’t it be equally successful this night? Unfortunately for me, at the end of the night, I did not give this pack away. Why didn’t I? That’s a great question and in truth I could give you several very valid reasons that I did not. But each one reeks of being a lame excuse and I will not burden you with them. There were several people I could have given them to. I could have just left them at the house I was at. Even better, I could have thrown them away. But I didn’t, I kept them. At the exact moment I chose to keep them, it was too late to do anything about it. I had cigarettes and I was going to smoke them. I had several Sunday morning and even through the evening and into Monday morning. Of course this whole time I kept telling myself, “I just have to finish this pack and then I’ll be done again.”
The first thing I realized is that I had been lying to myself. Obviously it hadn’t been a conscious decision. And in this case I think it was one of the more convincing lies I had ever told myself. I think most times that I have told a lie to me, somewhere, I knew it was a lie. In this case, I did not. I told myself I was in control, I had beaten this thing and now I was going to taunt it. I was going to use the occasional cigarette to remind myself how terrible they were and how much I didn’t need it. The moment I caught myself in the lie was one of the strangest and worst feelings I have ever encountered. I was driving home from somewhere, I don’t even remember where and I was angry about some little thing, I don’t even remember what. I remember sitting in my car on the freeway and just fuming over this little tiny thing. I was so unreasonably angry about it. It took a while but at some point I realized this. There was absolutely no reason for me to be so mad about this insignificant little thing. Then the thought entered my head that maybe just one cigarette would be good to calm me down, but no, I’m not a smoker, why in the world would I need a cigarette? That’s when it it me. Yes, I was unreasonably mad about something, that was being caused by the nicotine withdrawals and yes, I thought a cigarette would help, that was also being caused by the nicotine withdrawals and I was addicted again.
The realization knocked me on my ass. I’m sure most of us know how it feels to be caught in a lie. The guilt, the embarrassment, the frustration at being caught. Being the one catching the lie isn’t pleasant either, betrayal, anger, feeling foolish for having believed the lie. When you really truly catch yourself in a lie, you experience all of the emotions of the catcher and the caught at the exact same moment with no one to direct them towards but yourself.
The other thing that I thought was really off about this whole situation is that I was more comfortable with giving a poison to my friends than I was with taking it from them. Seems rather backwards to me.
Anyways, the good news buried in all of this is that I am back on track. It was a rough weekend but I’m back on the wagon again and feeling great. I do have some residual sore-throateyness and congestion from a weekend of smoking but I expect that will dissipate within a day or two at the most. While this was definitely a set back, it was not a failure. Merely a small stumbling block on my road to victory. I have no doubts that I have beat this thing. I may not be perfect, and I may not have done it all at once but my eyes are on victory. I am consciously aware of my struggling and I am fighting it. I will beat this.
See ya later.
-Paul

Windows Live Writer

Ok, I know I already posted today but I just read a post about Windows Live writer and I decided I need to give it a try. Partially because I have nothing better to do. It seems pretty cool thus far. It actually allows you to write things IN your blog. As I’m typing this, I am seeing exactly how it will look when it is published which is pretty cool. Just to explore some of the functionality here I’m going to be posting some random videos, links, pictures, etc. Please bear with me.

Fun little side note: I was a little unsure about the correct word usage above (bear with me) so I looked it up. I did actually use the correct form of bear in that circumstance. The website I used to verify this also gave the tip that using the phrase “bare with me” would be an invitation to undress together. I seriously doubt I will every have a hard time remembering that one again.

 

Fun little video Chris and I shot making fun of Mulligans golf course in South Jordan

Ok, adding videos is pretty sweet. Windows writer will link to your YouTube account and you can simply choose videos that you have saved to your account. Also, if you load a video file from your computer it automatically uploads the video to your YouTube account, allowing input of tags and descriptions for YouTube. That’s pretty sweet.

Awesome music video

Ok fantastic, I was a little concerned there for a minute. You can’t directly add videos that you have “liked” from your YouTube account but you can add any that you have added to your favorites list. You can also just find a video on YouTube, copy/paste the link into Windows Writer and you’re good to go.

The photo functionality is a little disappointing. I was hoping you might be able to link to a Picasa account similarly to how YouTube links. This is not the case. You can either upload directly from your computer (which works great) or you need to have the direct link to the photo on the web. There isn’t even a way to browse to a photo online to use. I would have thought that it would be fairly easy to integrate some of IE’s functionality into this program and allow you to browse to photos on the web. There are, however, some nice formatting options for photos. It’s fairly easy to change the size, background, border options as well as crop the photo and add some limited photo effect. You can also fairly easily add an external link to a photo, which is pretty cool.

Ooh there’s an option to upload a map to the post as well. I’d better find a way to try that… hold on…. oh, lame. It links to Bing maps. I guess that’s not altogether surprising, being a Microsoft product. That’s rather disappointing though. That could be a really cool feature but I don’t use Bing. I use Google. Like the rest of the world. The rest of the cool world anyways. Maybe I’ll have to play with that and see if you can upload a map from Google to Bing so I can blog about sweet cycling routes in the summer or all of those awesome trips I go on (hey, I should go on some sweet trips.)

This is odd. I’ve noticed that while scrolling through the post if you hit a video or picture, it stops scrolling using the mouse scroll wheel and you have to actually mouse over to the sidebar and scroll from there. Not really a damning glitch but it’s a little annoying. YES!!! Old school messenger emoticons FOR THE WIN. That is a definite plus for this program.

The formatting options are nice. It has all the typical windows functionality for text which makes it easy to emphasize things.  I can also use all the cool custom fonts I’ve downloaded for  Mystery theatre posters and such. Having a spell check built in is nice also because I’m lazy and I sometimes can’t spell. There’s also a word count feature which is essentially useless but kind of cool anyways. I actually checked the word count when I noticed that tool and it was at 666 so if you’re superstitious, you’re going to want to make sure to read past the beginning of this sentence. Good job.

This is kind of interesting. Apparently you can group a whole section to make it a block quote. It seems that it has to be seperated from the rest of the post by a page break though. That’s a little odd but I guess it’s cool. I was thinking that it might be annoying if you wanted to only quote one line but I guess you can just quote one line and make it a separate paragraph.

-Paul

The preview feature is great as well. It’s not really necessary I don’t think since I’m writing on the blog background as we speak but when you go to the preview it puts in all the little sidebars and things so you can see it all. Not hugely important but nice to be able to see. Also it’s nice that it won’t add views to my blog stats which drives me nuts.

Well, I think that about covers it. I think I’m going to go ahead and continue to use this program for now for all my blogging purposes. By the way, this post was really fun. I don’t think I’ve really ever reviewed anything before except short little Yelp reviews. I feel like this was a really good objective review. Plus being able to write the review in the program I’m reviewing was kind of cool and unique. I think I see more reviews in my future. I know, you’re super excited.

See ya later,

-Paul

There's just really not much to say...

I find myself really wanting to write this morning but with a complete lack of things I feel are exciting enough to write about. I suppose I could make things up but that just seems to kind of defeat the purpose of a blog that I'm writing about my life. Although I suppose it would give some insight into my imagination. I have been thinking lately that I might want to attempt to move my blogging time into the evening. I find that in the evening as I'm wrapping up my day I have all kinds of thoughts swirling through my head and I could get some really interesting (at least to me) things written down and have something meaningful to say. By the following morning, all of these cool thoughts are pretty much gone. I could solve world hunger one night and if I didn't write it down by the next morning I think it would be gone. I guess a general update couldn't hurt anything right?

I have never been more excited for a semester to be over than I am right now. This semester has been a busy one for sure. I am looking forward to my upcoming time off of work and school with great anticipation. My engineering class project has been a pretty major source of frustration for me lately. We don't seem to be making a whole lot of progress lately and we cannot, as a group, make a decision as to which way we're going to move forward. From talking to some of the guys at work it seems that this is likely to be a recurring theme throughout the rest of my schooling. Wow, that is just exciting as hell right? My math class hasn't been much better although that is more to the fault of the teacher than anyone else in the class. I will be so glad to be done with this guy. I really hope that my Calculus teacher next semester is better than him. Having a crappy teacher really makes it hard to learn. I don't think I've ever really needed to make that distinction before. I've always had really good teachers. This is a new experience for me and I have to say I think I could have done without it.

Work has been ok I suppose. Nothing terribly exciting going on. I'm working on a few projects at the moment but it seems like most of them end up giving me a couple of hours worth of work for a day and then several days of waiting for something else. There's been some drama over updating working drawings of our new ceramic brackets. I guess people are expecting me to do them but I don't know what needs to be done. Our chief technologist has a whole bunch of things he wants changed in the prints but he won't tell anyone what needs to be changed and he's getting frustrated that it isn't done yet. Makes sense right? I was supposed to meet with my boss yesterday and find out what the situation on that is but he was a little late yesterday and missed the meeting. I guess I'll find out about it sooner or later. Probably I'll get a list one day and they'll expect all 240 individual drawings to be updated the next day. Sweet!

Ok so I might be in a bit of a pessimistic mood this morning. Ah well, this too shall pass. I'm gunna go listen to some Chili Peppers and see if I can't find some work to do since I've been at work since 6.