Grant's Blog

I’ve posted a number of photos from our group camping trip to Joshua Tree from this past weekend. I’ve started to use Adobe Lightroom to organize and edit my photos, and so far I’m loving it. It also has the option to post both HTML and Flash based pages to a site via FTP, which I’ve used to create a gallery for this trip. As I get better and take more photos I’ll post more of these types of galleries.

I’m quite happy with some of these photos, but of the 257 photos that were taken only 17 were good enough to post online for others to see. Most of my exposures are being done through trial and error, I’m trying to pick the shutter speed and aperture I think is right, take the picture and then adjust as needed. Sometimes I’m way off on my first guess. But all of these photos were taken on a manual setting, so I can at least say I chose the exposure that you end up seeing.

So I’m learning, but slowly. I still need to get a better eye for seeing pictures. Jill took some pictures of the same events I did and hers are much better in composition. As she mentioned to me, I tend to take pictures too close, she gets further back and shows the whole scene.

Generally, I need to start taking technically correct photos that show the scene, then I can start taking artsy pictures.

Yes, yes, I know I haven’t posted a real entry in umpteen billion seconds. Or more precisely, just about 11,000,000 seconds (that’s orders of magnitude more precise, even though it’s still very round.) I haven’t been talking the time out of life to write, as was the intention of this site. It’s one goal of mine that I’m failing at, and I think I just found another that will suffer the same fate.

Not long ago, I made a list of life goals on my online notebook. One of those goals I’ve had for a long time now, it’s one of those goals that can only be accomplished in death. My goal is to only shave half the days of my life.

But now, Esquire makes a compelling argument for Shaving Every Day.

Of my life goals, this seemed to be the most achievable. It’s the only one I had a real plan for. I figure I have 15 years of built up time on the front end, and I’m not wasting shaving days on weekends. Then, once I’m rich and have a fancy car collection, I wanted to grow a beard like Billy Gibbons. That will hopefully build up another 15 or 20 years on the back end. But now I’m thinking of abandoning this goal because of Esquire.

Thankfully, I have a week and a half to think about this before I’m faced with making a decision. This weekend I’m headed out to Joshua Tree, where it is perfectly acceptable to go unshaven and “look tired and sloppy,” as Esquire describes it.

43%

…is the most under appreciated instrument ever. A while back I saw a retrospective of Leonard Cohen songs and one of them was a guy playing Leonard Cohen songs on a ukulele. It was awesome.

And here is some ukulele music for you to enjoy.

A friend of mine asked me, “What do you believe in?” This is something I’ve given some thought to so I had an answer for him, but it wasn’t as coherent or thought through as I would have liked. I highly enjoy the radio segment on NPR This I Believe. It’s interesting to hear other’s beliefs in their own words and is one of the reasons I’ve put some thought into my own beliefs. In order to force myself to think through my beliefs and to be able to express them more clearly, I’m going to make it a project of mine to write essays about all the things I believe in. Thankfully for you, This I Believe’s website has essay writing tips that I’ll likely need.

CNN Video : Search for Fosset

CAPBlog linked to this great segment about CAP’s efforts in the search for Steve Fosset.

I haven’t talked about CAP at all since relaunching this site, but it’s an organization I’m a part of and very proud of my service to it. I have friends that are out there helping with this search and I truly wish I could be out there with them. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to train up for Search and Rescue operations. Even though we likely won’t have another search of this magnitude for quite some time, it will probably prompt me to work towards getting qualified to help in the future.

In preparation for Tuesday’s Lunar Eclipse I’ve been practicing photographing the moon. In this sequence of photos the moon is a bit over exposed (except for maybe the top photo) and the moon wasn’t quite in focus. I’ll have to do better before the eclipse.

At the new apartment Jill and I are having a little problem with our wireless network. I have an older D-Link DI-614+ that doesn’t have quite a strong enough signal to provide good networks speeds throughout the apartment. It has worked great for years, but it’s on one end of the apartment and we use our laptops largely on the other end in the living room. There are a number of walls between us and it, so it’s understandable that it’s having some difficulty getting to us.

Our first solution was to get a new G router that would hopefully provide faster speeds. First we tried the Linksys WRT54GS. Then we tried a Netgear WGT624. We went back to the Linksys WRT54GS but added a Linksys WRE54G. All of these have been returned and we are back to using the D-Link. We are now contemplating purchasing an Apple AirPort Extreme. If we still need a network extender we would be able to get an AirPort Express, although that’s an expensive solution.

Here are the shortcomings of each router we tried, and why I will likely never buy one of their products again, especially Linksys:

Linksys WRT54GS
My biggest problem with this router is that its configuration site doesn’t work in Firefox on a Mac. I’m not sure if it works in Firefox at all, but I wasn’t able to try it in Windows. It did work in Camino though, so once I figured that it it made things a bit easier.

However, the second time I tried to set it up (with a new actual router since the first one had already been returned) I wasn’t able to get it on the internet.

Linksys not only doesn’t give any instructions on how to set up its products with a Mac, its user guides crash Preview when they are opened. Luckily I had Acrobat, but most people using OS X don’t bother with Acrobat since they have Preview installed by default.

Netgear WGT624
This router wasn’t the easiest to setup. It mis-diagnosed the type of internet connection I had, it wanted me to manually set up my IP and other network settings. I was able to get it up and running on the internet through the advanced settings. However, once I got that part figured out I had no problems with it. However, it still wasn’t strong enough and didn’t improve the connection speed in the living room.

Linksys WRE54G
This is one of the worst products I’ve purchased in years. Do not buy this network extender. I found a site giving step by step instructions on how to set up a WRE54G. Even though I tried following these instructions I was never able to connect to the extender’s web interface. I even tried to set it up with all three routers at various stages. I was at least expecting it to work with the Linksys WRT54GS but I wasn’t even able to get that working. This was the most frustrating product of the three because it never got working at all.