I’ve been reading The Strobist for a bit now, and realized that I’d just missed last year’s Lighting 101. Apparently he’s running a second course this year (aptly named Lighting 102). I picked myself up a few goodies. All but one of the items was from eBay.

The Nikon SB-800 was purchased new from B&H Photo. I’ve been after this for a while. Actually, ever since I saw it being used under the CLS system. It was quite impressive to watch one of the guys from TPF link 4 of them together, and trigger them from one on the camera. Next was a light stand, umbrella, and a nifty little gadget that allows you to mount a standard speed light to a standard light stand.

This completes a little kit, which I will use for both the strobist project, and some other things I’ve been planning on. For example, a recipe book. As mentioned in the past, I’ve become a little interested in cooking again. For mother’s day, I concocted a stuffed port chop, with green beans, and mushrooms. It’d be nice to make a recipe, and take photos of it so I know how it turned out. Maybe oneday I’ll be famous (or infamous), and have my own book or something.

The photo to the left is my first real shot using the above equipment. It is of my laptop keyboard, and obviously needs a dust. Have to try figuring out how to stop the cat sleeping on it.

Definitely NSFW, this semi-amusing clip comes from the Royal Marines operating in Afghanistan. And here is the clip.

With Bill’s current obsession with lolcats, I thought he might find this slightly amusing.

How do you turn a 12 (or more) hour job into 40 minutes? Script it…

I’ve somehow got myself roped into a triathlon at work. This should be interesting. Good thing is, it’s not until October, so it gives me plenty of time to get fit again.

I was crawling through my feeds this morning, and this BBC news article caught me because of the snippet.

A man and woman found dead in a garden next to an electric lawnmower may have been there overnight.

Why did that get me? Intrigued by the link to the electric lawnmower. I had a feeling it may have had something to do with their death, however, when phrased like that, you might wonder if they were killed with a gun, and left with the lawnmower. My brain works in odd ways.

Also in the article, is a bit of bad phrasing, or more particularly titling, on the BBCs behalf. They mentioned that the Wales ambulance service believed electrocution, but later retracted that statement. The bit that got me was the title ‘Shocked’. This was really in reference to the neighbour being shocked that they were dead, but in light of possible electrocution, seemed a little… er… poorly titled.

I’ve been renting a Nikon 105mm VR Macro lens from ZipLens, and got to take a trip to Dallas Arboretum last weekend. This is one of the shots with the lense. I have this one as my desktop at the moment. I quite like it. Very nice bright orange-yellow. There are more here. I’m playing with Flickr at the moment for a quick experiment, but will probably upload these to my gallery soon.

While this really isn’t a huge amount of magic, it shows how powerful a simple shell script can be. It’s also probably an example of non-efficiency, and there are probably much better ways of handling them.

One of the helpdesk guys reported an issue with a third party vendor trying to send us pictures of vehicles. They claim that they have been sending pictures, but we’re not processing them. So I decided to take a look at the logs. I’d been given a bunch of VINs to track down, and over 2GB of log files. This wasn’t going to be a fun job.

A while ago, I posted an quick item on normalization of my music collection. What it left me with, was a directory full of all the music files, and no particular layout at all. I’m particularly fond of trying to keep my directories tidy, no mater what operating system, so this was beginning to bug me just a little bit. My standard format is “/media/artist/album/”. Sometimes I will also use “/media/artist/album/track# - Title” so that they are in order by their track number. As they were all lumped into one folder with the file naming convention of “artist - title”, this would require just a little bit of work, or a little bash magic.

I think there is a conspiracy at the moment to get me to try and track things. What I mean is in terms of projects, tasks, goals, and such. I think some of the blogs I read are also in on this conspiracy.