The weather around here is crazy. Friday I was out taking some pictures at Green Timbers Park. People were fishing in the lake and basking in the sun (with coats on, of course). Saturday was cooler with the wind, but still not bad. Sunday and today were just plain blizzard-like at times, and I heard on the news that Naniamo got a real dump – close to 20cm of snow. It’s supposed to go down to -4 or -5 tonight. Guess that’s spring in BC.

Anyway, I’ve had my MacBook Pro for about a month, and so far I’m liking it. Sure, there are a few gotchas like having to duplicate all the software I use every day, but I’m getting use to it.

For some things I’ve found open source alternatives to serve until I can afford the commercial stuff. I can’t afford another $2K to upgrade my copy of Adobe CS4, so I’m trying Gimp as an alternative for photoshop. It seems powerful enough, but it is confusing to start with.

Some stuff I’ve purchased, like Lightroom and Office for Mac. I also picked up the pared down version of Mindmanager the Mindjet offers for the Mac. Being pared down is not a real issue though. I don’t use that many bells and whistles in the Windows version anyway.

I might experiment with a copy of windows to run on the mac. I’ve heard it’s possible with bootcamp or parallels. We’ll see. It’s another alternative for now.

I love the way the Mac boots up. It is so much faster than my Windows machine. With all the little helper programs and things that start with Windows, it takes about 10 minutes for the machine to settle down for work. On the Mac, I’m ready to go in about a minute. Hope it stays that way as I add software.

For the last month, learning about the mac has taken up a lot of time. That’s something I didn’t count on, but I guess it’s to be expected. Now I’m bouncing back and forth with relative ease, but I still have to think about what I’m doing on the mac. It will come.

What a gorgeous day!

A buddy and I went for a drive, trying to find some eagles today. Boy, did we luck out.

We went over to east Delta, near the Boundary Bay Airport. Everywhere we looked there were bald eagles soaring or resting in trees. Lots were in their full ‘bald-iness’, but there were a few young ones around as well.

Most were in pairs in trees, or soaring around in fours, looking for food or just enjoying the light breeze from the ocean.

After we tired of taking pictures of eagle bums in trees, we headed off to Richmond to see what we could find at YVR. Took a few pics of the planes coming in and of some of the estuary on Iona Island.

Overall it was a great day. I took a ton of equipment in the car with me, but ended up using my Sigma 120-400 lens all day. Oh well. If I didn’t take all the stuff, I’d need it and be kicking myself, I guess.

Yikes, what a difference from Windows!

Expensive – yes

Different terminology – yes

Different workflow – yes

Different software – yes

Different installation process – oh ya

Slick – still experimenting, but I think so

We’ll see over the next couple of days

Well, I’m back. Not sure where this is going, but here’s the first post of the new year. Life does take a few curves, but we’ll see if we can do better than we have the last couple of years, shall we? Heh.

Having a full time job really sucks up the time. That said, I’ve picked up some new skills and gotten back into photography.

Back in another life, I assisted at a studio, while collecting a wage subsidized by our federal (un)employment program. Learned a lot, and that helped me grow and develop some modest skill with a Pentax Spotmatic camera. Loved it.

The Spotmatic ended up in a lake (thanks to my ex ;-), so I moved ahead with a Konica and then an Olympus. They had some electronic bells and whistles, but I never really liked them. For one thing, I could not keep the Olympus running. It ate batteries faster than I could supply them. 

I later found out that the circuit board on the camera was cracked from the start, and that’s what was draining the batteries. But by that time, I’d found other things to occupy my time and the warranty was *very* expired.

Two years ago, I started taking some event pictures at work with an old Fuji S2. What a wave of nostalgia. But the quality of pictures soon wore thin as I watched my colleague shoot with an S3. Jealous me jumped in and bought a Nikon D80.

Things have blossomed since then. More lenses. A D300. More lenses. A D700, and still more lenses and gear. Yikes it’s scary. But it’s also exciting. Some of my skills are coming back and I’m loving it.

So what you’ll get here will probably be a scattering of photo talk, along with some other stuff I find interesting (for some reason). Let’s see where it goes, shall we?

If you want to follow along, I have a Flickr photostream here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/donsca/

It’s a work in progress. Like this blog, heh.

Out to dinner with some friends/relatives on Saturday nite. They live a different life than I do. They’re hard working, hard drinking, hard living, hunting, fishing, give-me-mosquitoes-to-traffic-anytime type people.

I’ve been there, but I’ve tempered significantly since the 1980’s. Life in the city does that to you. On the other hand, they live as much as they can up at Chuchi Lake, about 2 hours north of Ft. St. James. Now that’s where you find mosquitoes and fish!

Anyway, what a meal! BBQed steaks, corn-on-the-cob, baked potatoes, garlic prawns, and coldslaw for the main course, followed with a lovely light birthday cake for my sister-in-law. Not sure if the meat was a result of hunting last year or not. Didn’t care, it was great.

I haven’t had a dinner like that for a very long time, and it was quite a treat. Thanks to Sandi for cooking it up, and to Sharon, Duke, and Rod for the conversation.

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I got to thinking about that last post and why I felt I needed to write it. Here’s what I’m thinking:

When we get one kind of phone call, we immediately think about the worst that could happen. An example is the call I got when I was out of town, about a leak in the apartment roof that was letting water in. It was affecting the smoke alarms in the building. Rather than accept that at face value and think about how little it could mean, I started imagining a dry wall ceiling full of water collapsing into my apartment, only to bury my computer and furniture.

The result was actually quite different: a small ring of discoloration around a smoke detector.

Why did I immediately think the worst? Why didn’t I just think it was probably a minor issue to begin with? One that I could deal with in good time, after my short holiday?

I guess a lack of information at the start may have played a part. I got the message from my landlord, who’d heard from the building manager at the end of a long day. We all know how stories change as they pass from person to person. Information gets added or lost in translation.

But if the call had been from someone telling me I might have won a million bucks, that would have been different. No matter how many mouths it had gone through, I would have thought about all the neat things I could do with the money. I wouldn’t have thought about all the scam artists that were going to haunt me and all the things I’d need to do protect myself.

Wonder why we do that?

Extreme examples, I know. But it makes me wonder: do we always follow the lede? A positive lede results in positive thinking, and a negative lede starts negative thoughts? That’s something to think about when we communicate with others.

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We were just sitting down to watch ‘The full monty’ at my sister’s place in Royal Oak, just outside of Victoria. I hadn’t seen the movie, so I was looking forward to an entertaining evening.

A few minutes into it, my pager went off, indicating a phone message at home. When I called, it was my landlord. It seems a repair person was working on the roof of my apartment building, and had an accident with some water. It had entered the building and was now traveling down the electrical system for 5 stories. The fire alarms kept going off because the water had seeped into the fixtures all the way down. They really wanted to put a stop to it. My landlord feared there might be even more damage.

They couldn’t get into my apartment to see how much damage had been done, or to access the smoke sensor circuit where the water was. Seems no one had a key. I said that seemed odd. Up until about two years ago, they’d come in on their own on a regular basis, while I was at work, to check all the smoke detectors. Still, I had just enough time to catch the last ferry back. I suggested that perhaps they’d find the key in the building manager’s office?

No one called back last night, so I had a tough time sleeping. In the morning, Sister asked what I wanted to do. After thinking all night about it and creating all kinds of scenarios of what might be going on back in the apartment, the 11:00 am ferry seemed the way to go. It was a few hours earlier than I expected to go, but at least there would still be time to do something in the afternoon, if needed.

It was a long ferry ride, and an even longer drive from the ferry dock home.

No one was around the manager’s suite when I got in. A good sign?? Up the elevator… key in the lock…the door opening slowly. The apartment hallway looked about the same as I’d left it. I looked up at the smoke sensor. There was a moisture ring around it on the ceiling, but it and the light beside it seemed dry. Ok, check the other fixtures, the piping, the area around my office and computers. All seemed dry. No sign of most of the disasters I’d conjured up. I mean all the drywalled ceiling was still in place, and not all over the floor in a big wet mess. That’s a good thing, eh?

There was a note on the hall table from one of the strata councilors: Please call as soon as I got home. Seems we had to remove the smoke sensor, disconnect it, reconnect the circuit. All would be well until repairs were made and new sensors installed. The company that was on the roof with the water had accepted responsibility, and repairs would be made in good time.

Whew. The good part was that the rest of the building’s smoke sensor circuit was now active again. At least we’d know if there was smoke in the building. The sad part was that my little holiday was cut short.

Pizza and a movie to relax tonight…ham, pineapple, anchovies, and feta (don’t knock it until you try it ;-), and Aeon Flux. Oh, and a big sigh of relief before a good sleep.

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Sorry, just had to laugh during the Global news tonight in Vancouver. One of the top stories was about a dog that had attacked a deer in a Kelowna Park. Seems the owner had let him off the leash at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and the dog had chased down the deer, wounding it.

Of course the ‘people’ stories followed with rants about those bad dog owners that do that – let their pets off the leash.

I guess the birds had seen the incident too, and rapidly spread the news about the wayward dog. It has to be, because the next story was about the deer in Princeton, BC. Apparently they’d got to know the community so well they were staying in town all summer, and not just in winter when the snow was deep.

Anyway, turns out the deer in Princeton have started attacking the local dogs now, and the town is thinking about a cull (of deer).

Maybe the poor animals were just getting back for the Kelowna dog-deer incident?

Got to wonder…

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