Busted For Bad Camera Management
This weekend I am up in the Grand Marais area with my friends Steve and Dennys for a photography weekend. We went out shooting today and the weather wasn’t cooperating. We had a lot of grey and dull everywhere, but we persevered.
We shot a bunch in the morning out at Artists Point in Grand Marais and while I was shooting Steve and Dennys busted me for very bad camera management. Of course they photographed me in the act.
Do you see all of my mistakes? Oh boy.
Let me share to help us all be better camera owners.
In circle 1 you can see that I’m actually tilting my 70-200mm lens upwards allowing the hood to catch as much snow as possible and direct little flakes onto the front to melt.
Circle 2 highlights that I have the entire imaging assembly of my camera open and exposed to the elements.
See circle 3 in my camera bag? Yeah, another lens with no cap on the rear element letting more snow accumulate and screw up future photos.
Consider this a public service announcement for us all. 😀
Dennys grabbed this shot of me shooting in the snow today at Artist’s Point in Grand Marais.
Just got an offer for tickets to see Def Leppard with Heart opening. Thought it was 1988 again.
Lasagna on Big Green Egg
This weekend we had friends over for dinner and I tried something new. I decided to try making my lasagna on the Big Green Egg. The Egg can work as an oven, so why not?
I was also doing a squash for the side dish so I fired up both grills to get cooking.
I made the lasagna exactly as I would have otherwise but instead of putting it in the oven I simply popped it into the Egg.
The squash got some brown sugar and butter with nutmeg and cinnamon.
The lasagna came out pretty good. I learned a couple of things.
- I placed the lasagna directly on the plate setter, with feet down. This was a bad call. The plate setter I suspect was hotter than 350 °F and it caused some burning in the pan. I should have done it feet up with the grid on to keep the pan isolated.
- The lasagna comes out with a smoky flavor. It reminded me of smoked mozzarella. Just a thought, you could cover the lasagna with tinfoil for half of the time to reduce the smokiness. You could pretty much dial it wherever you want.
- I would recommend using a ceramic baking dish. I used an enameled pan, and it was okay but I think a ceramic dish would have provided some needed protection for the pasta in the grill.
I liked the end product and would definitely do lasagna in the Egg again.
Tyler refused his morning nap after swim class this morning. By the time we got to lunch, he was too tired to eat.
iPad 2 (0.34 inch thick) is 0.005 inches thicker than Kindle 2 (0.335 inch thick). I read that as “same”. Impressive.
I gave a talk today at a class at the University of Minnesota. I used it as a trial run for presenting right off of my iPad in Keynote. Worked great! Was liberating to have such a small device to present from.
Digging out some SATA cables and bare drive adapter this afternoon to rescue a Mac. I always find this stuff fun, when it is easy. If you are curious, the funky bare drive adapter I have is the Newer Technology USB 2.0 Drive Adapter.
Was Wrong on OpenID
My friend John asked me to present at a class of his next week at the U of MN. I took an old Keynote presentation I had from a couple of years ago to start with and ran across this slide. I don’t think I could have been more wrong!
I was definitely an OpenID advocate at the time, and for a long time before this talk. Makes me sad though since OpenID was open, and not owned by any one company. Hyperlinks between OpenID’s are such an elegant way of creating connections and is so web friendly.
Weeds Season 6 just hit iTunes. Yeah!
Just spent two hours cleaning vandalism off of one of my websites. (mediawiki, not WordPress). Nasty Internet out there.
The Black Keys: Brothers
I heard an interview with The Black Keys on Fresh Air on MPR. That is probably the least hip way I could describe discovering a cool band like The Black Keys. I picked up their new album Brothers and am loving it. I highly recommend it! Make sure to turn up the volume, especially on “Black Mud”.
Michael Birawer Prints
The hallways of the 8thBridge office just got classed up! The building added a number of Michael Birawer prints. It makes the space feel a lot better.
368MB of Ads
It has been a really long time since I used the Wired application on my iPad, but I recently fired it up and bought an issue to peruse. The experience could not have been more frustrating!
First, after I paid for the content, I wasn’t able to download it because my iPad’s storage was full. I use the option in iTunes to fill empty space with music. I had to go delete a movie to make room for a magazine. Somehow a magazine is as big as a movie?
After deleting, the download starts. 368 MB of data. This takes forever. Even on a good, fast Internet connection. About 15 minutes later I still see the bar filling up.
Still waiting. Finally it finishes, and I think I can now finally take a look at what I bought. Oh wait, I guess we have to “Install” this too?
About 20 minutes after I started I could browse through far too many advertisements. Don’t think I’ll be repeating this process any time soon.
Driveway Avalanche
Our driveway provides almost no opportunity for me to get snow out of the way. I blow a lot of it over the fence into the backyard, but also blow a lot of it against my neighbors garage. There is a limit to how high you can go though.
I’ve debated next fall creating a series of wood shelves to set next to the neighbors garage. I could then blow the snow vertically into the shelves and I could get it 10 or 12 feet in the air. It would work as a form of snow fence.
We got snowed in again. The weather says we got 14 inches of snow on Sunday. Happily it was a long weekend so we just stayed inside and let it come down.
New Standards Pano at Lantern Festival Gala
Here is a shot of the scene while the New Standards performed at the Lantern Festival.
This was taken with You Gotta See This! on my iPhone 4.
New Standards at Lantern Festival Gala
One of our favorite bands, The New Standards, announced they were playing at the Lantern Festival Gala for Yinghua Academy.
Yinghua is a Chinese immersion school in Minneapolis and we have a few friends that send their kids to the school. We’ve heard nothing but good things. Tammy picked up tickets so we could support a good school and get to see a relatively small and intimate performance by The New Standards.
It was a really good show.