(5-31-08)

January 12th:

     So somehow I managed to go from September to January without doing any News of the Moment. It's not that there wasn't anything going on, I just didn't really feel like writing about it, I suppose. I did finally get new carpet installed in my house, although I don't have any new pictures of it right now. Rest assured it looks a lot like the old stuff except newer and without 8 or 9 years worth of color fading.

     If you've been to the photo page you no doubt already saw that I posted some pictures of my recent trip to North Carolina to see my parents for Christmas. I had a really good time there and you can read a little bit about that in the intro of that photo area. I've been there three times now and each time see something new. I'm sure there will be at least two or three more trips worth of good destinations to see before I'll really have to put a lot of effort in to finding new stuff to go see there with my parents.

     So what inspired me to write something today? Well my friend Kimberley in Boston called recently asking why I hadn't updated my page so I decided to start trying to think of a few things I wanted to mention. As it turns out, I thought off all kinds of stuff to post, but I'll just keep it to things from the last week or so. In tradition with what I did for a couple updates last year, I would like to list some things that I have decided that I like and do not like. I'll start by getting the things I don't like out of the way first.

     Four things that I don't like

• Stuff breaking. I replaced a bunch of door stop things in my house today because the old ones would always break, and upon doing so, my walls would get impaled by the doorknobs when doors were opened. Also, recently the driver's side power door lock to my Civic has been acting up. Sure, it's an idealistic thought, but wouldn't it be great if you could just buy something once and have it always function as intended?

• Movies that are out of stock. I went to Blockbuster this weekend and wasn't really sure what to rent so I just wandered around the store for probably 15 minutes looking for a movie to rent. I spotted Devil's Advocate which Lori once told me was a decent movie. Ok, so I reach over to grab a copy and get.. denied! There were no copies in stock. Instead I just get taunted by the fact that I could have rented it if it were in stock.

• Spam. Who doesn't hate spam emails? I'm fortunate not to get 20 or 30 a day like I hear some hotmail and yahoo mail folks do, but I still probably get 8 to 10 spams a day. I read a story on C|Net not long ago that said approximately 85% of all emails sent is spam nowadays. This is ridiculous. I have no idea how this will get fixed, but it's really frustrating.

• Mean people. My boss at work is not a nice person. Now sure, probably a lot of people say that about their boss but I felt that this week my boss has reached a new level of demonstrating his inability to care about anyone beside himself. He threw a fit at me on a conference call on Monday, and by Friday I explain to him that his behavior was not appropriate. I then asked if there was a point afterwards that he even realized he did something wrong. Sure, he says, a day or two later. Yes that's right, it took him "a day or two" to even realize he said things he should not have, and furthermore never bothered to actually apologize for it until I brought it up.

     Five things that I am thankful for

• Digital cameras. I said this last time before I archived all those entries, but I really feel that the digital camera is one of the greatest inventions of the last 10 years. For people like me who love to just randomly take pictures of all kinds of stuff and quickly show it to others, the digital camera is just the coolest thing. Now that I have one, I can't believe I went so long without one. I recently just surpassed the 5000 pictures saved mark with my digital camera.

• Things that are reliable. There's so much stuff that breaks when you don't expect it to, from those door stops I mentioned to the fluorescent lights in my garage, to even the plastic base of my blender. It makes me appreciate things that just continue to work year after year. I nominate my 7-year old Pentium 166Mhz Linux computer, my 6-year old Honda Civic with 100,027 miles on it as of this writing, and my 8 year old Pioneer CD player and amp for their ability to simply keep working and not cause me to waste time and money replacing them.

• Friends that call out of the blue. I first started talking to that girl Kim maybe a year or so ago. It's kind of a casual long-distance friendship which for me ends up meaning that I never call her. I think I've called her twice ever. We exchange emails all the time, but there's something special about a phone call. I'm just kind of lazy about making calls though because I always feel like I'm going to interrupt the person I'm calling. Kim however has called at least once a month for the whole time I've known her. It's nice to hear a friendly voice when you least expected it.

• Really good movies. I don't have cable or even a TV antenna so when I'm in the mood to just kick back and watch something I rent movies. The way I see it, cable is at least 30 bucks a month and suffers from the whole "there's nothing on" problem pretty frequently. On the other hand, I can rent unlimited movies from Blockbuster for $20 a month and most of the time I pick something that I enjoy. Not every movie is great, but many of them are better than average network television. I'm not entirely sure how there seems to be this unending pool of creativity in the world that keeps turning out hundreds of good movies every year, but I'm glad that they keep it up.

• Good health. This week I realized I am fortunate to have always had pretty good health. By some bizarre coincidence of fate, I not only came down with a really nasty cold this week but I also had my last two wisdom teeth pulled. Most of my Tuesday and Wednesday were spent blowing my nose, being tired and miserable, and constantly bleeding from my gums. It was the first time I'd really been miserable in health since my allergies conspired against me during my North Carolina trip in May last year. Other than that, I've never broken any bones or really had much of anything significant happen to me. This week made me realize I should be quite happy for this fact.

     As mentioned above, this week my Civic turned over 100,000 miles. It did so without any fanfare and really without me even noticing until I happened to actually really look at the odometer when I got home from work on Friday. I purchased my Civic brand new in February of 1997 and it's been through a lot in the last six years. I'm on my fourth set of tires and second set of brake pads, and it's seen three different road course events and probably 120 autocross runs as well as a few trips to the drag strip. For the most part though, it just keeps going and doesn't need any special attention. Not bad for a car that was $16,200 out the door including tax, title, and everything.

     I also got to try out a new thing I learned about my camera while I was in North Carolina and reading a digital photography magazine my dad had bought. If you go through my sunrise/sunset page you'll notice that around August of 2001, the only sunset pictures that had really rich color were ones where 80-90% of the frame was on the sky. This is because I didn't have any way to control the light metering with my digital camera the way I could with my Pentax or Nikon. As it turns out though, with the Kodak I can simply aim the camera at the sky, push the shutter button halfway and that will freeze the white balance and shutter speed. I can then reframe the picture however I like and it will have richly saturated colors even if the bright portion is only a small part of the frame. Sound confusing? Well here's an example. Here's what normally happens if I just aim the camera directly at a sunset and take a picture.

     The camera uses it's automatic settings to try to guess at what the picture is supposed to look like. Because it contains a lot of dark elements such as the foreground at the bottom of the frame as well as through the whole center of the frame, it tries to brighten up the image, assuming that maybe perhaps it should be trying to make the blue of the sky and water expose within the normal color ranges you'd expect. Fair enough, you can see the water quite well and make out the nice white, feathery clouds but other than that, the image is either dark or washed out. It completely fails to capture what I wanted. In order to try to compensate for this, I used to just aim the camera up a whole lot so the sky was the overwhelming majority of what the camera saw, like this next picture.

     So now we see the colors of the sunset just great, but no reflection off the water, which I think can add a pleasing effect to the overall image a lot of the time. Still, this is what I had to settle for any time I wanted to capture, deep, rich colors of the setting sun. Once I realized that holding the camera at the halfway point locked the exposure settings, this meant I could aim the camera up at the sky, like in the picture above, press the button halfway, and then recenter so it frames the picture the way I did in the very first picture. The end result is getting the photo framed the way it was in the first picture, but with the exposure settings recorded when aimed at the sky the way it was for the second picture.

My not-so-green front yard

     So finally, I could capture images the way I did back when I used my 35mm cameras. It's a small thing, but still a nice tool to have in my inventory for the next time a picture opportunity with complex lighting crops up. So other than the taking pictures, I actually managed to keep myself somewhat busy this weekend. Among other things, I decided to try to green up my front yard. The grass I've got seems to be a summer grass mainly, except that the part that always gets direct sunlight all day was usually somewhat brown in the summer. Then once winter rolls along, it all turns brown and weeds start showing up in the lawn. I would be able to tell myself that's normal if it weren't for the fact one of my neighbors has a lawn so perfect and green that he could use it for putting practice.

     As such, I decided I'd spend a few bucks and see if I could get any grass to come in over the next couple weeks or so. I picked up a small bag of fertilizer as well as general purpose "cool weather" grass seed, a spreader tool, and the CLAW. The CLAW was of course the most important thing I picked up, mainly because it looks like you could hurt someone with it and I wanted to be able to tell everyone I own the CLAW. Say it with me now.. the CLAW! Yeah ok, so I just wanted an excuse to post that sound file. At any rate, the CLAW is this cool thing that you use to aerate the ground, or basically punch a bunch of holes in it and get the dirt to move around a little and not be entirely hard packed. This helps the new grass have a place to go and spread roots so it doesn't just die upon trying to burrow into the ground.

     Using the CLAW turned out to be a huge pain, only slightly made easier by the fact I kept reminding myself that it ought to be fun to use a tool with a name like the CLAW. Instead I mainly just became tired, frustrated, and get my shoes really muddy since the ground has to be wet in order to achieve the best penetration without damaging the CLAW. Once that was done, I got to do the easy part, which was to pour all the grass seed into the spreader along with a little fertilizer and just let it blast grass seed all over the yard. I have a pretty small yard and the range on the spreader is good, so I could do this just by walking around the sidewalk surrounding my yard and spare myself from getting my shoes any muddier.

     While at Lowe's buying stuff for my lawn, I also spotted something that I realized when I first saw it that I absolutely had to buy it: the Sierra Saw. I got one of these probably 12 years ago at least when I went camping with my sister and her husband and we wanted something to cut up wood with. They're cheap ($12) they fold up for easy storage and prevention of cutting yourself, and are amazingly effective at cutting through wood quickly. I had a tree branch that I had wanted to cut in the past, but it was far, far too thick for my hedge clippers to get through, which is what I usually use to take smaller branches down. This was obviously a job for the Sierra Saw.

     The branch was probably about three inches around, so it wasn't too big, but like I said, there was just no way it was going to come off cleanly with the hedge trimmers that I had been using for branches up to about an inch and a half. You'll see below a couple pictures, one of which includes my hand around the branch to give an idea of scale. It took me all of maybe 10 seconds to cleanly slice the branch off with the Sierra Saw. It is already easily worth the $12 I spent on it, and I know that it will probably last me pretty much forever, or until I lose it again.