MikeBrum.com

LA was great. Lily was great. SeaWorld… you guessed it – great.

The flight to LA was nice and easy, and the flight back (despite crying babies, toddlers kicking my seat and a fat kid next to me snoring over my iPod) wasn’t too bad. It just sucks when you lose the 3 hours to the time zones.

I’m still rather tired and will be heading to bed early tonight. I want to start doing some work with the photos I took this weekend (which are 99% from SeaWorld), but I’m thinking that might be bounced till tomorrow in lieu of napping on the couch.

But on that note, I’ll yammer more once I have something engaging to post.

I’m switching web hosts. This is the “new server”.If you’re seeing this, then you’re all set.

Mondays are some good TV on sci-fi. You get a few hours of ST:TNG and then some anime. I’m liking it… a lot.

This weekend I signed up with a new webhost – Tektonic. It’s a VPS, so there’s a lot more for me to manage on my own, but it’s a lot more fun and offers me a lot more freedom. I’m this close from cutting off my former web host. I just have a little issue with mail that I need to sort out before doing so. Once I get that squared away, I’ll be ready to turn it off and disable the account.

We went to the Franklin Park Zoo yesterday. I both like and dislike zoos on a few different levels. I mainly went to check out the butterfly exhibit that they have – basically a huge greenhouse that has a bunch of free-flying butterflies. It opened a week ago and I wanted to see what sort of photo ops there are. They’re pretty good – and I intend on intend on going back at least a few more times this season – it’s great to have what amounts to a captive audience for photo subjects. Now all I have to do is go through the photos and process them.

I’m flying out to LA on Friday morning – early. Should be fun – I’m excited! Not too excited about the 6hr trips, but at least I have non-stop flights from BOS to LAX and back.

We st up a dive trip to the Isle of Shoals at the end of August. The gist is that we boat around find the harbor seals in the area and then drop in the water somewhere near them. Then we just hope their natural curiosity brings them over… chances are good and we’re excited.

That’s the long and short of the past few days and beyond.

Swung by the comic shop on my way home and picked up the latest Cthulhu Tales. I really like a lot of the stuff coming out of Boom Studios these days. It’s a nice change of pace from the typical super hero comics.

I don’t really think I have any other news. I’m just glad to no longer be on call and have my schedule get back on track. Yay :D

I’m in the home stretch of my on call duties. Tomorrow AM at 10:30 the phones switch over to someone else. I plan on sleeping in and hope that I don’t get any early morning calls.

Last night a bunch of stupid stuff broke (I think someone made some real stupid mistakes and broke it) and I basically spent a lot of time last night fixing it. I had to get up every hour and a half, starting at 01:00 checking things. Ugh.

At this point, I’ve had “enough sleep” in terms of raw hours, but the problem is that I haven’t had enough uninterrupted sleep. It’s this sticking point that’s really kicking my ass and making me feel mostly exhausted.

In the good news category, I have a new lens arriving today. There’s a ton of construction on my street, and my street is a dead end, so I’m thinking there’s a low chance that the UPS guy might not be able to find his way through, but it’s out for delivery. I’m assuming that I’ll see that it was, in fact, delivered and head home after this meeting (which ends at 2) to remove my new and expensive toy from the porch.

We shall see.

Either way, if my phone stays silent, once I get home, I plan on napping on the couch.

Today’s been slow in terms of not receiving any calls from work (hope I didn’t just jinx myself there). So earlier Corinne and I did some running around and I decided to stop at a gaming store and pick up some translucent dice to play around with. Since ETTL metering is an absolute mystery to me, I decided to read up on it last night and see what I could do. All-in-all, I’m happy with my results and it’s given me a lot to think about in terms of technique and execution.

For the those interested in the tech side of things, I’m shooting with a 30D, 100 f2.8 macro lens + 36mm extension tube, Canon MT-24EX twin light with an off-camera 580EX II working as a slave off the MT-24 with a Circular Polarizer filter. Not bad just for some dice pics, eh? As always, none of these images are cropped – merely resized for the web. And it’s also worth noting that I didn’t touch the saturation on any of these. I opened them up in Bridge and then Photoshop without making any changes in ACR at all. Since I was just tooling around (and originally had no intention of sharing these shots), I didn’t bother using a cable release or mirror-lockup. If things are a bit fuzzy, that’s one reason why.

When you see two shots with the same composition but different colors, the difference will be mostly be the light position and rotation of the CP.

It’s 6:15 and I’m still up.

I went down to RI last night around 9 to hang out with a friend that’s in town from the West coast. Took off a bit before 2 and rolled into bed around 2:45ish. Not 5 minutes after I dozed off, my phone rang and I had to get up and log in to solve problems.

I think the problems are fixed, I’m just waiting for a few long-running processes to get past various points before I can hand the issue off to a lower tier.

Last night was super late getting to bed at 7:00am – today’s not faring any better.

On a good note, it’s nice to see Corinne before she goes to work. I’m usually asleep when she gets ready and leaves. On a bad note, I’m still awake since yesterday… so little more needs to really be said.

I’m definitely drifting into the “starting to feel loopy” stage where I fear I’m going to make stupid mistakes because I’m having a hard time concentrating.

Ok – enough rambling.

It’s been hot here. Very hot. I’m dealing, but not without some crazy fan and AC action. The kitties seem to be getting by, which is always good.

Wednesday AM I’m primary oncall. Right now I’m secondary, which means I can get calls, but it’s not that often. I got one on Saturday, and it was more a political think than an actual tech issue per se. Hopefully things are light and I can keep working on the super-secret project that I’m kicking off tonight. Should be both fun and useful when it’s all done.

Work aside, got a trip coming up at the end of the month. Gonna spend a long weekend being nerd and tourist in LA visiting Lili. I’m definitely excited and expect to have a great time. I’ll also be down over the 2nd Annual Anomaly BBQ, so I would expect us to make an appearance at some point.

I haven’t done any more image processing tonight (busy with that super-secret project!), but hopefully I’ll get to a few more in the coming days and I’ll naturally post them here. I purchased a CP from B&H for my 70-200, which I’m excited to get. Should help with some of the landscapey pics.

I’m starting to get tired, so I think I’m going to save all my work and call it a night soon. I’ll be doing night work tomorrow night, so there’s little reason to wear myself out already.

Here’s a few macro shots of anoles from my NC trip last weekend. Shot with 30D + 100mm f2.8 macro + Canon 500D close-up filter + MT24-EX flash.

These three all came out of the same opportunity, which is why they’re so similar. I liked them all, so I figured I’d just post the three.

As always, no cropping, just resized for the web. Click for larger versions.

I’m working in McDonalds right now. Not serving burgers, but I got a call on the road, so I rolled in and I’m logging in remotely. The network guy is fixing some stuff right now, so I have a few mins.

Can’t wait to get back on the road and get back to enjoying my Saturday.