While I was taking shots (see Please Login or Register to see the link. post) I saw an opportunity to try and take a nice shot of my wife.

This is what I ended up with… critique and criticism is welcome!

… is the highway between Horseshoe Bay (North Vancouver) and Whistler, BC. Late in the September Christine and I took a little weekend getaway in Whistler. We’ve tried to make it an annual thing for us. We usually stay at the Whistler Pinnacle (although quite frankly I feel the hotel has been gradually heading downhill since we first started going up there.) Every time we go we also make a point of having a (in my case) steak dinner at Hy’s Steakhouse.

So about once a year I can say that I’ve had a really good steak!

Either way. Here are a couple of shots I took of the mountain landscape between Squamish and Shannon Falls, not too far outside North Van. I’d say my favourite is the last one. It can be really powerful country up that way!

… thought I would tool around a little with our Sigma Macro Lens (allowing me to get closer than usual). Just a couple of fun shots.

The one thing I WAS working on though was using the rear LCD screen’s “Live View” feature to try to do a far more precise job of focusing on the exact point I desired. Often, critical focus work requires a manual touch the AUTO just can’t compete with. Unfortunately, wearing glasses and having just generally poor eyesight, I have found that I have great difficulty through the optical viewfinder determining where the exact point of focus is.

SO… little effort and I feel I’ve managed to nail where the points of focus are:

The first are a couple of (seemingly) wooden statues that we have with a Thanksgiving theme. We got them at HomeSense (O_O – ya, I know…) of all places. We thought they were kind of neat as a table decoration.

The second is a collectible Disney statue which consists of a new Mickey looking at himself in a mirror and seeing the old Mickey. The effect is achieved by having two statues of Mickey (old and new) on opposite sides of a transparent plastic “mirror”. The effect works quite well and the piece is actually quite nice (even for someone that doesn’t have Disney fetish).

… hi folks.

After discussing my blog with Dad, I began to wonder why he was having a few problems as I was trying to talk him through the site. Last night, as I was trying to figure a few things out I decided to put my screen to the same resolution as his and everything became clear. I didn’t realize that my pictures where too big for a 1024×768 resolution to show properly.

Until I can figure a way to make the gallery AUTO-size based on what the viewer sees, I’ve decided to make my pictures no more than 500 pixels tall. Sorry to those with larger screens (like my 24″, damnit!)

Also, I’ve managed to simplify navigating from page to page. The links at the bottom of each page were ridiculous and I wasn’t happy with them. I’ve now replaced those links with a page number bar. Here is a sample of what you will see at the bottom of every page:

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The bar is grey. The number with a black block around it is the page you are currently on, with page 1 being the most RECENT entries of my blog. You can navigate forwards and backwards through the pages with the arrows or select the page you want directly by clicking on the page number itself.

Go take a look all the way at the bottom and try it out to get used to it. It is up and running now.

Hopefully this will simplify things for everyone. I also find it looks far more elegant.

Anywhoo, hope to get some more pictures up soon.

RadMan

… one gets projects done.

Couple of things I’ve been working on.

1. Workshop area. I’ve now finished the workbench and have substantially finished the workshop area. The idea is that tools will be hung on the backboard, the the 8 ft long table will give ample room to work on projects. As you can see from all the clutter, I’m still in the process of sorting and organizing.

2. Home Network. I got tired of having the network gear in the house all up in the office. I wanted everything that might need to communicate either with the internet or with the media server to be able to do so at full speed… so I wired the house and pretty much all the wires come to the storage room where the water heater is located. I’ve got the cable modem, router and additional network switch all connected and functional. All I’ve got to do now is finish restoring the drywall. I had to cut a few holes in the walls to run the network cable. All Cat5e.

Cheers!