A sign taped over the prescott history plaque downtown:
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
Goin’ Camping
Me and D are rolling out tomorrow to go camping with Sadira. Be back tuesday. Have a great weekend everybody. :)
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Silliest auction site ever
Swoopo is possibly the silliest auction site ever.
The breakdown:
- You pay ~$1 for every bid you place
- Your bid raises the purchase price by a set amount (either $.15 or $.01 depending on the type of auction)
So, to take this auction for example:
Canon Rebel XSi
MSRP: $899.99
Final Purchase Price: $23.96
Winner placed 249 bids.
This auction was a ‘penny auction’ which means that each bid increases final price by $.01. The starting price was one penny.
So let’s do some math:
- The winner placed $249 worth of bids, plus pays the final price. So the winner came out with a great deal at $272.96 for a nine hundred dollar camera.
- All the people who placed the other 2,146 bids lost out. As a group they paid more than $2k for the privilege of playing this fancy slot machine.
- $23.95 / .01 (price increase increment) means that Swoopo received $2,395 for all the bids that were placed. Swoopo makes out like a bandid, 266% of the MSRP.
Now take THIS auction for instance:
Nintendo WII
MSRP: $249.99
Final price: $213
Winner placed 18 pids
This auction started at $.15 and each bid increased the price by another $.15.
Math:
- the winner gets merely an okay deal paying $215.70 including their own bid fees for a $250 piece of merchandise.
- $212.85 / .15 = $1419 paid to swoopo in bid fees, an astounding 567% of the MSRP!!!!!
My question is: why not just go to vegas to lose all your money with the off-chance of hitting it big? At least there you get pretty girls and a mild sense of luxury.
Local celebrity?
Just read through the newest issue of PopRocket and who do I see featured?
Our very own Rich Charpentier. Maybe I’ll ask for his autograph next time I see him…
Pic of the day
A happy accident. I saved this HDR as a TIF file instead of a radiance file. Of course I didn’t notice until I had tone-mapped it. Kind of dark and fore-boding. Muted colors and exaggerated tones. Kinda cool:
Compared to my regular HDR workflow:
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
I spy with my little eye…
Something that, up until this point, I had only ever seen pictures of.
Apparently Nissan decided to take their $80K Skyline GT-R over to the united states. They dropped the Skyline from the name, but seriously… who’s even going to notice that while they drool over this sexy machine?
And the five hundred horsepower doesn’t hurt either. This thing looks like it’s speeding when it is parked:
I’m in love.
EDIT – apparently I am uninformed. The Skyline is still around, but has headed in a different direction than the Skyline GT-R of my memory, and is now more of a sporty family car. How faux paus of me.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Pic of the day
A pic of DaNece from our little photo outing on Saturday. This one was using the pop-up flash (meh) with the sun behind her highlighting her hair:
Monday, March 2, 2009
Chicken soup for the soul
Except for it’s got hamburger, and tastes kind of tex-mexy:
It was early this morning when I prepped it all, so I can’t say as I honestly remember everything that went in there.
I do remember the following:
- browned some hamburger
- cut the corn off of two cobs of corn and threw it in the pan to roast for a bit
- threw all that in the slow cooker along with 1/2 onion, 2 carrots, a bunch of green beans, two potatoes, 3 fresh cloves of garlic, a lot of cumin/paprika/cayenne, and enough beef stock to cover.
- let it cook all day
- cooked up some rice and added it to the pot
After all that it tasted good, but not great. Then DaNece had the great idea of putting green chiles in it. PERFECT!!
Add some crusty bread and you got yourself a great meal!
What have you torn apart lately?
DaNece and I went out to play with flash photography over the weekend and I found a huge limiting factor to my setup. The SC-28 chord that I purchased only lets me get a few feet away from the flash. That’s great if I am just holding the light off to the side with my hand, but when I set it up on a tripod and go to move around D it was severely limiting.
I almost dragged my flash over a number of times, which got me thinking that there must be extension cables out there. And surely, there are. For the cost of a whole ‘nother cable I could put the two together to get a 6’ cable… not exactly what I had in mind.
So I browsed the internets and found an article about hacking this $50 cable to bits. I got out the knife and cut right through the cable. I hoped this would work.
A trip to Home Depot to pick up a couple of female network jacks, and a few minutes of separating wires and punching them down into the jacks. I was done:
I plugged it all in, threw a 25’ network cable on it, and turned the camera on. The cam showed a flash connected, the flash showed connection to camera, and I fired off a test:
SUCCESS! And instead of a $50 cable for three measly feet, I spent $10 on some jacks, and about $10 for the cable!
Pic of the day
My last post garnered quite a few responses, so why not post the complimentary image?
The rear to Friday’s front, also a 3 exposure HDR, but with a little different processing:
Friday, February 27, 2009
Pic of the day
An early morning photo walk revealed a different look to a sculpture I walk by all the time. Cowboy with nigh lights on just as dawn breaks:
Thursday, February 26, 2009
A little bit O’ photography random
John Keatley has a blog. It’s pretty sweet and there is tons to learn from his portraits. (via)
Great story about a guy who collected un-developed rolls of film from cameras in thrift stores. Eventually he got them all developed and posted some of them onto his website. Some of them were taken by photographically-minded folks, but a lot of them are just oddball snapshots. The oddballs are my favorites, like this one and this one.
Nikon has a cool tips episode by Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski, for those Nikon shooters out there. (via)
Carry on.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
De-Ivyfied
Apparently the proprietors of the Courtyard building have decided to remove the ivy that once covered the walls of this interesting place:
For pics of the ivy in its glory day, check out Granny J’s post here.
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