Two and a half weeks and I already have racked up 1350 shutter activations of my new K10D. I'm going to wind up wearing this thing out in only a few years if I keep this rate up! :)
Just before the airshow last weekend I added a second lens (SMC Pentax-DA 50-200 f/4-5.6) and a Pentax AF540FGZ flash to my lineup. The flash is likely going to get returned to B&H - it consistently underexposes EVERYTHING by at least a full stop, usually 2+.
I got some great results from the show, but need a longer lens before the next year's one. I'm tempted to buy a Tamron 70-300 lens soon (The Quantaray rebadged version is only $150), and maybe next summer go for either the Sigma 135-400, the infamous "Bigma" 50-500, or the Sigma 100-300 f/4.
I now have a Smugmug account - http://andydodd.smugmug.com/
With the exception of the $*)@!*#)@! port-o-john blocking part of the view, this is my favorite picture so far:
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I didn't realize how long it had been since my last update... I haven't even really been reading my friends page that faithfully lately.
Work is still going well. I can't believe I've been up here for a year and a half now. The past six months have gone by so fast.
I just got back from my 5-year college reunion last weekend. God I feel old, nearly all of my friends were there with spouses or fiancees (most of whom were ALSO friends of mine at Cornell). Sadly, despite being a 5-year reunion, except for one or two people, everyone I saw were people I see at least once a year. None of my friends that don't attend Homecoming at Cornell attended Reunion, although this is not surprising - like myself, most of my friends had closer ties to the band (which spanned classes) than to our particular graduating class. Despite this disappointment, it was fun, other than the severe camera envy that I came out of the weekend with.
A friend of a friend at the reunion had a Nikon D200 DSLR and some serious glass. (I'm estimating on the order of $5000 between body and lenses.) We talked for a bit and I realized how much I missed shooting with an SLR. (I had stopped because film was too expensive, and for my 21st birthday I was given an Olympus C-3000 which had lots of SLR-like features as opposed to the minimal functionality so many other digital cameras of its time had.) So now I have a Pentax K10D on order from Amazon, which will hopefully arrive Friday in time for this weekend's Strawberry Festival in town.
Why the K10?
1) Nikon can go fuck themselves with a chainsaw after the .NEF metadata encryption fiasco. They're never getting any of my business until they change their tune, which likely means that they're never getting any of my business. Also, the D80 was just a bit out of my price range if I wanted an image stabilized lens. My Panasonic DMC-LX1 has spoiled me in terms of optical image stabilization.
2) A Canon Digital Rebel XTi with their "general purpose" IS lens was a serious contender due to previous good experiences with Canon, although it was a little expensive. At least this was until I found out that the XTi didn't have spot metering - the body alone costs twice as much as my LX1 and the Panasonic has spot metering. It also apparently refuses to record in raw format in certain shooting modes - Even though they are modes where one "doesn't really need RAW", I want RAW recording to be set-and-forget, I don't care if it results in giant files, flash memory is cheap nowadays.
3) My family has previously owned a Pentax SLR (a PZ-70). While I never liked how difficult it was to find compatible accessories from third-party vendors, Pentax-branded equipment doesn't seem nearly as overpriced as it used to be (or maybe I'm just richer and stuff doesn't look nearly as expensive as it did to a high school/college student), the Sigma 28-200mm autofocus zoom lens and Pentax 50mm f/2 fully manual lens sitting back home in New Jersey will both work with the K10D. Even better, the K10D's sensor-based image stabilization (and yes, it's actual mechanical correction, not crappy digital stabilization) will work with both of those lenses. Mmm. 320mm image stabilized telephoto. (the K10D's sensor size means that all lenses have a 35mm equivalent focal length that is 1.6 times their actual FL.) Oh yeah, the K10D not only has a documented and supported-by-dcraw RAW format, it also gives the user the option of shooting in the open DNG RAW format. |
I just got back from a trip to Boston visiting old friends I haven't seen in years. (Two since summer 2003, one I haven't seen since 1999ish.) Gas prices were extremely painful, a total of around $80-90 in gas costs. At least 1/4 of that is being paid for by someone who hitched a ride with me there, unfortunately they weren't also riding back with me so it wasn't 1/2. :)
Boston is a great place to visit, but I sure wouldn't want to live there. All of my friends there are paying triple what I am in rent and have apartments pretty close to mine in size.
This may sound strange, but I actually had dim sum for the first time this morning, as a bunch of people went to a little Chinese restaurant near MIT for Sunday dim sum brunch. I was a little nervous about eating such a huge meal, much of which was rather sweet, just before a long drive, but my friend was up to the task and my drive home went well, other than being really damn long and traffic on the Mass Pike being a little bit heavy. |
OK, it's been WAY too long since I've updated. I'll make a general update post soon. I swear... REALLY!
For those that have been paying attention to the news, the crazy weather in the Northeast caused the Susquehanna River to rise to record flood levels starting last Wednesday. (Yes, I know there was massive flooding everywhere else too... But the Susquehanna was particularly bad.) On Wednesday morning I left for work and the access road to the park down the street from me was totally flooded, up to the intersection at the end of my apartment complex. Not TOO bad, that section of the road is notorious for flooding, so I went to work.
Most conversations at work were dominated by talk of people's adventures getting in. By 11 AM or so, Route 17 (major highway, soon to be I-86 in a few years once a few more improvements are made) and 434 (parallels 17) were closed about five miles east due to flooding.
After lunch I went back to my apartment to check on things. The flooding was worse, MUCH worse. The river broke over the banks next to the road leading to my apartment complex, and was pouring over rapidly. I rushed back to work, said goodbye, and grabbed my things and went back home. The road was barely passable with my car. I think I've mentioned before, but I live practically across the street from work, so that took a total of fifteen minutes.
An hour and a half later, around 2ish, the firefighters declared a mandatory evacuation. Here I discovered that "mandatory evacuation" means "if you stay we take down your next of kin and you are notified clearly that we are NOT coming back if there is a problem". My neighbors and I decided to stay - despite our proximity to the river, two of the five buildings in my complex are built on elevated embankments well above the levels of previous record floods. One is lower, and two are very low. I (and nearly all of the fifteen or so that stayed) live in one of the highest two. Why did we stay? Given a choice between hopping between shelters (the first set of shelters had already flooded) with the clothes on our backs, or staying with all of our food/medicines/supplies in buildings that are much higher than most people realize, we chose to stay. After the firefighters left we waded across the ditch seperating our complex from the mainland and brought back two shopping carts full of supplies, as at this point, the supermarket across the road was still open.
The rest of the day we watched the water slowly rise (at a rate far slower than that which the firemen expected) and barbequed out on our front porches. It was actually a great experience as everyone in our complex got to know each other pretty well.
At 6:30 Thursday morning there was a car fire on the access ramp to the bridge near our apartment. Apparently it went something like this:
Lady stopped by police, after a minute or so of conversation: "I think my car is on fire." - jumps out of car
Fifteen seconds later, WHOOSH - car bursts into flames.
The remainder of the day we slowly waited for the water to go away. Our maintenance manager took his van out at around 3 PM, and it was possible to walk out without getting wet at around 5:30. The first sedans started passing through the flooded section of our road at around 6:30. During this time we heard helicopters going overhead all the time, including at least one Black Hawk (definately not one of the H-60s from work, wrong color and wrong objects mounted to it, we're pretty sure it was an Army H-60 variant) and a Chinook. From all reports we'd heard, downtown Owego was in REALLY bad shape. At this point the parking lot for the grocery store across the street was completely flooded, and so was the store itself.
By the next day, almost all roads were reopened. Those of us who worked across the street at Lockheed eventually went in, most of us for partial days as we were all exhausted from our island adventure. Basically nothing was happening over there except for tying up end-of-the-week loose ends and making sure everyone we knew was all right. The grocery store was closed all day and didn't reopen until noon Saturday. Our complex didn't get power until around 8 PM. McDonald's didn't reopen until Monday I think, and Pizza Hut was still closed due to lack of gas yesterday evening. That's odd, as we never lost gas or water at the apartment complex down the street.
As exhausting as the experience was, it was the experience of a lifetime and I'm actually glad it happened.
Sometime soon I'll make some pictures available. By the way, I realize that this post turned out to be massively disorganized and probably has grammar errors all over... Too much to post, too little time. I was behind on errands such as cleaning my apartment even before last week happened. :) |
I'll get back to posting again, I swear, really!
I still intend on keeping any and all non-work-related posts public, I just haven't made any posts yet this year that didn't at least have something work-related in them. All I'll say for now is that I love it here. I plan on a more complete non-work life update post soon, I've just been insanely busy since moving here. |
| » OMFG... |
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Again, it's been a while since my last update. Got the family RAID box up and running, returned back upstate. (what do I call "home" now? I'll be considering Owego home pretty soon...)
Work is going well. The apartment currently looks like a bomb hit, I need to organize shit tomorrow. Over the past few days I spent quite a bit of time on beer bottle label removal in preparation for my next batch of homebrew. Hot water or cold water = useless. Hot water with Oxi-Clean or similar product (i.e. anything with sodium percarbonate and sodium carbonate) = watch the label fall off in 1-2 hours of soaking. (Note for anyone coming across this with Google or whatever - DO NOT use Oxi-Clean/etc if you intend to keep the label for collection. It WILL fuck up the colors. This is only for those homebrewers who want to recycle their commercial beer bottles for homebrew.)
I'll probably brew a batch next weekend. During today's shopping trip up to Ithaca, I bought an ingredient kit for some Irish Stout. Hopefully it's a decent recipe. Good news is that it's from Munton's. Bad news is that it's an "all in one" kit - everything but the yeast is in the can, the hops have already been soaked in. Still, it'll be hard for it not to beat my last batches, which turned out surprisingly drinkable considering that I used bakers' yeast instead of brewers' yeast. (There is a difference...)
The new hires club at work went ice skating tonight. It rocked. Afterwards I decided to check out the Owego bar scene with some light barhopping. I wound up only going to one bar, John Barleycorn's, because the music was so great and I liked the atmosphere.
That gets us to the OMFG part of this post. In contrast to New Jersey, where everyone is afraid of everything, people are so open and friendly up here in Owego. It's so refreshing after three years in the Toxic Wasteland State.
Which reminds me, this journal is probably due for a redesign since my adventures in the Toxic Wasteland State are over. Thanks to OpenID, there's a good chance I'll just start blogging at andydodd.net once I pick some OpenID-enabled blogging software to put there.
Oh, by the way, if anyone is wondering where I got the term "Toxic Wasteland State" from, I got it from a friend who posted on a mailing list talking about having to drive through the Toxic Wasteland State to get from his place in PA to a Columbia-Cornell football game in NYC.
Jan. 22nd, 2006 @ 12:41 am
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| » PowerEdge 1, Andy 0 |
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Spent a few hours working on getting my dad's new RAID file server up and running. I decided that for this box, I'd go back to a traditional "binary package" distro. Ubuntu is all the rage and so many people seem to like it, so I decided to try it.
Bad Idea. Something about their setup results in really wonky DNS performance. There are tons of posts where people have DNS problems, and I seem to be one of them. The machine was inconsistent at resolving anything until I allowed it to automatically update the kernel. Now it won't resolve anything whatsoever. Networking is working fine, as I can SSH into the box, but DNS is just horribly broken. It shouldn't be, as resolv.conf is identical on that machine to all other Linux boxes I have on this network (as it should be since resolv.conf is filled based on whatever the DHCP server says.) There are other issues too.
So tomorrow I'm going to bust out some stage1 Gentoo-fu on that box. I'd rather not be running Gentoo on a machine whose primary purpose is to be a fileserver because of the amount of system resources needed to do a system upgrade, but since every other Linux box I've run in the past two years has been a Gentoo box, I'm going to stick with it for consistency.
Newjob is fun. Home for the weekend to pick up some stuff and hopefully go to Princeton hockey game. Tired from driving through fog. me sleep now.
Jan. 14th, 2006 @ 01:19 am
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| » WOOT! |
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I finally have internet access and TV again. Time Warner just came and hooked me up tonight.
My employer has a deal with Time Warner that gets me a $10/month discount on RoadRunner service. :)
I now have digital cable, although right now the box is turned off. Most of the channels I'm interested in are analog, so the cable line is just feeding my PVR-350 for the moment. I'm going to add an AirStar HD-5000 to this box soon to tune in the digital stuff.
Over winter break the hard drive in my family's desktop died. DIAF Maxtor! Just before moving, I helped my dad put together and order for a Dell PowerEdge 830 server box plus a NewEgg order for three 250G Seagate Barracudas. Soon the family will have over 500GB of redundant RAID5 goodness, no more losing data to hard drives.
I'll be putting together a nearly identical config sometime near the end of January or beginning of February once a few paychecks have arrived. Aforementioned AirStar and PVR-350 will be transferred to that box.
OK, time for bed. I'm soooooooooooooooo tired.
Jan. 7th, 2006 @ 12:56 am
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| » So much crap, so little time |
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Yesterday I got a call from the apartment complex I'm moving into.
Another apartment in the complex, which was previously spoken for, is now available essentially immediately. This means I can move in on the 1st. YAY. Also, unlike the other apartment, this one has a view of the river. Same dimensions, same rent, better view. DOUBLE YAY.
The bad: I have 34083223489708234 things to get ready to throw into a U-haul, and only 4 days or so to do it.
Oh yeah, this means no New Years' plans for me unless they're in NJ. Oh well, it's worth it not having to commute from my aunt's for two weeks.
Dec. 28th, 2005 @ 10:46 am
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| » Long time no update. |
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I am sooo tired...
Summary of the past week: Leave on Friday the 16th for upstate NY. Tour apartments, then go to aunt's house. Tour more apartments Saturday, then my aunt's annual Christmas sing-along. Tour another place Sunday, then go up to Ithaca for the evening to visit friends.
First day of work Monday. Both of my first two days are orientation classes, kind of like drinking from a fire hose.
Drive home Tuesday night, study, take my EWR final on Wednesday. Met one friend for a late lunch, then hung out with another friend. Then I headed back to upstate NY.
Thursday - first real day of work. My first assignment was right out of my EWR final.
Friday - Second day of work, was kind of dead since most people had already started their vacations. Then I drove home Friday night.
Long week, definately no insomnia for me this time around. :)
This coming week I need to pack, try and see friends before I leave town permanently, and figure out what I'm doing for New Years'. Since it now looks like I can't move into my new apartment until the 15th, this means I might actually be able to go out of town for New Years', although there may be interesting stuff going on in town. I'm honestly not sure yet, since I was assuming a need to move that weekend I didn't really make any plans.
Oh yeah, it's looking like work is going to rock.
Dec. 25th, 2005 @ 10:58 pm
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| » No more classes, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks |
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Yesterday was my last class ever. I also have finished up all of my project reports. All that remains between me and graduation is an easy final exam on the 21st.
It's really weird, for the past year and a half, I've thought of almost nothing but getting out of here, but this past semester, especially the past month, was actually pleasant. Go figure, I finally met some interesting and friendly people that I got along with at the end of my last semester before graduation. For the first time, it feels like I might actually be leaving something good behind when I move out of here.
Packing up is going to be a royal pain in the ass. :(
Dec. 13th, 2005 @ 07:20 pm
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| » Ow |
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Got owned on my EWR midterm. Two questions were easy, one question I totally bombed. It all came down to the question requiring a formula that I didn't write down on my formula sheet and I didn't remember.
At least I passed, and honestly, that is all that matters at this point. :)
In less than two weeks I'll be starting my first day of work. I can't believe how soon I'm going to be out of here!
Dec. 5th, 2005 @ 11:37 pm
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| » Less than three weeks remain. |
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An idea of my schedule for the next three weeks:
EWR Midterm on Monday Dec. 5 (Going to be easy)
Finishing up an EWR computer experiment (coding is done, just need to do the writeup. Easy but VERY tedious and time consuming.)
Writeup for another school project. Again, the coding is done and I just need to do the damn report. Even in LaTeX, it's a pain in the ass.
Family Christmas Sing-Along at my aunt's house on December 17. Instead of returning home afterwards, I will be starting my first day of work at Lockheed Martin on the Monday the 19th. (I formally accepted their offer today, I had one other offer that was better except for the location, and location was VERY important to me in this case.)
Work one more day, return home for my EWR final on the 21st, then drive back upstate for two more days at LM. Back home for Christmas and packing. During the previous week, I need to do some apartment hunting.
Return upstate and (hopefully) move into a new apartment around New Years'.
I'm finally going to be done with school forever in just a few more weeks. Thank God.
Sometime in the spring I'm probably going to start playing around with some Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGAs. REALLY nifty devices, I've always wanted to do some stuff with FPGAs but have always been put off by the price. Spartan-3s are only $25 in single quantities for the 400k-gate version direct from Xilinx, and the dev tools are free too.
Oh yeah, the song I'm listening to now rocks too. Competition results from Assembly are always a good place to find good music. :)
Dec. 2nd, 2005 @ 10:16 pm
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| » WTF Verizon? |
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When I changed numbers to get a local one in my area three years ago, Verizon Wireless told me that they were giving me a Somerville exchange. All was happy, and my cell phone was a local call from home.
Sometime since then, Verizon Wireless has somehow decided that my cell phone's exchange within the 908 area code is in Freehold, NJ, despite the fact that Freehold is DEEP into 732 territory. My cell phone is suddenly not a local call from home.
WTF?
Well, I'll be changing it to a 607 number soon anyway...
Nov. 20th, 2005 @ 07:38 pm
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| » I really need a second tuner. |
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Ooops. Have to be more diligent about checking my recording schedules.
A rerun of Prison Break took higher priority than Surface tonight (oops - that rerun wasn't marked as having been recorded because I recorded something else instead of it and downloaded PB via BitTorrent last week).
In addition to downloading this week's Surface, I need to download this week's Prison Break too since Las Vegas preempted it.
Having a second tuner on my Myth box would make life SO much easier. That'll probably happen when the 750G-1TB media storage machine gets built. :)
Nov. 14th, 2005 @ 10:32 pm
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| » Fun with a new toy. |
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I bought a refurbished Xbox on Thursday.
It is now sporting a 120 gig drive (I didn't have anything smaller that was spare or temporarily retaskable as the case was with what used to be my external Firewire data dump drive), with the original Xbox partitions preserved so that I can still play games if I want, but the remaining 110 gigs of space is now a big ext3 Linux filesystem with Gentoo installed. :)
Eventually I'll be downgrading the drive since this box's primary purpose is to be a MythTV frontend. 120 gigs is MASSIVE overkill for this machine.
Nov. 13th, 2005 @ 01:12 am
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| » WHOA - TV downloads are getting popular |
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Episodes of last night's LOST went up on Mininova around 5:20 AM.
At this point, if you combine the statistics of the two largest torrent swarms of the episode, you get the following:
60,000-65,000 people have already completed the download.
35,000 people (including myself) have downloads in progress.
This is assuming the tracker isn't lying about the number of completed downloads. Nevertheless, there are 11.5k seeders and 19.6k leechers on my torrent, and 3k/15k on the second largest.
(I don't record anything on ABC with MythTV because ABC is too cheap to put in a decent broadcast transmitter. The end result is that recording ABC tends to make my tuner crash.)
Nov. 10th, 2005 @ 11:13 am
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| » Long time, no update. |
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I have a job offer from Lockheed Martin in upstate NY. I'm almost definately going to accept it, I'm just going on one or two other interviews to keep my options open and to save my ears from extreme pain. (Read: I'll never heard the end of the griping from my parents if I don't give these other places a chance at least.) Upstate NY, here I come!
I've managed to stay much busier this semester than expected, despite taking only one class.
Homecoming in Ithaca 2 weeks ago rocked.
Overall, life is very good. :)
Only 2 months until I'm done!!!
Nov. 2nd, 2005 @ 04:11 pm
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| » woot! |
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I had a job interview with a great company in a great location on Monday. They have some really cool openings, and the general feedback I've had from both the people I interviewed with and their HR people has been quite positive. I talked to an HR person today to clarify some questions they had (such as when I graduated), and they said to expect to hear more from them next week.
Exam of Doom is seeming less and less scary as I study more. One section will be cake, one will be mostly cake, one will be somewhat nasty but is looking much less so as I study for that particular section.
My schedule is going to be nuts during the upcoming weeks.
Exam of Doom Wednesday the 5th
Cousin's wedding the weekend of the 8th in Texas
First midterm in my one class on the 12th
Bonecoming 2005 up in Ithaca on the 15th
Keep in mind that I was out of town the past two weekends too.
Oh yeah, I probably shouldn't have but I paid full price for a Treo 650 last Saturday. mmmm high-res screen. I can play NES games in addition to GB games with Little John PalmOS now, in addition to much higher quality when I watch movies. Or at least I could before my cheapo SD card died yesterday. I returned it for warranty service today, and also ordered a 1 GB card which will hopefully arrive before my plane ride on the 7th. :)
Sep. 29th, 2005 @ 10:48 pm
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| » Up and down week (more up than down) |
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Bad news first - Rutgers ParkTran are a bunch of fucking sadistic bastards. Busch permits were sold out long before I was even eligible to purchase a permit for this year, and Livingston permits no longer permit you to park on Busch. Combined with the lot opening times being moved from 4 PM to 6 PM, this means that a commute that used to take me 20-25 minutes each way now takes an hour and twenty minutes EACH WAY. Yes, that's as much time each way as I spend in class.
The C bus was not fun, but the B bus sucks far more. Time to upgrade to a Treo 650 so I can watch movies and TV episodes on the bus. (My T600 can do it, but the low-res screen makes them look kinda ugly.)
This was balanced out by really good news - I have a job interview with a great employer in a great location (near Ithaca) on Monday. So that's two weekends in a row I'll be spending upstate. :)
I also obtained a sample copy of the M.S. Comprehensive Exam of Doom. Looking at the exam, the "of Doom" suffix may not actually apply. :) Two sections will be a cakewalk, the third won't require too much studying.
Sep. 22nd, 2005 @ 09:46 pm
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