A couple more

I know I'm taking forever with these...I'll get a few more of them up eventually.


Sell photos on photrade | By KD5NRH



Sell photos on photrade | By KD5NRH



Sell photos on photrade | By KD5NRH

Things are settling down

Vacation's over. After a couple more days at the 12x7 contract, it's over, and I'm just covering a couple extra shifts so the guys that were having to work 12x7 at my regular contract during the other one can get some time off.

I've been slowly going through the photos from the vacation as time allows. I've got almost all of the B&W film developed and scanned, and it looks like about 600-700 shots total. Obviously, not everything turned out, and a lot are near-duplicates for exposure bracketing, but I'm guessing around 50-75 keepers by the time I get through adjusting exposure levels, touching up dust on the film scans, etc.

Here are a couple of my favorites so far:




Full set of the ones I've gone over so far at Flickr.

Tired...

Sonogram001Crop
Originally uploaded by KD5NRH

I've been working 12+x7 for a while now, and vacation starts after tomorrow, so here's a baby picture to keep you entertained.

For those who haven't heard...

..my wife's pregnant. First positive was 6-25 when she went in for gallbladder surgery. (Needless to say, that didn't happen.) I decided to hold off the announcement for a bit to make sure, and on 7-2 we went for the first OB/GYN appointment where they're pretty well convinced, though we're still waiting for the second test results.

Mom's coordinating the hand-me-down maternity clothes and assorted infant supplies from the rest of the family, and we're still trying to buy a house, since there's almost no chance we'll get anything built on our land in time, given the hassles of getting a construction loan right now.

Vacation is still on for August, since it doesn't look like we'll be getting one for a few years afterward.

What would the media say...

...that the SWAT team found in your house?

Thinking back to the Lisa Nowak incident and the description of the contents of her car's trunk, I decided to look around the house a bit and see what the media could report on finding.

Multiple loaded firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and high-capacity magazines. Well, duh. There's at least one brick of .22lr, and several boxes of handgun ammo running around. At some point, I also got a good deal on 12ga #8 loads, and we keep finding boxes of them that have been moved out of the way. Let's not forget the military ammo, either; I still have some Greek surplus .30-06 and Russian 7.62x54.

Bottles of mixed chemicals, including one containing pentetic acid, which is used to treat radiation poisoning. Maybe, but I'm going to have to be pretty near death to drink T-Max developer and hope for any improvements from one of its minor ingredients.

Several knives. Gnawing apart a raw chicken isn't very appetising.

Professional-grade photographic equipment. Because terrorists would rather spend a few thousand on cameras than use Google StreetView to do their surveillance, no doubt. They're also so concerned with the quality of the images that they'd rather lug around a big obvious SLR and tripod than discreetly use a camera phone.

Books on combat shooting and survival skills. Another duh. The gun isn't much use if you don't know what to do with it, and a dead animal is going to be mostly wasted if you don't know how to butcher and cook it properly.

Highly accurate GPS devices. What good is a highly inaccurate GPS device?

Police scanners. Gotta have something for local news.

Encryption software. Yep. Make 'em work for it. Encrypt lots of boring stuff, even if you don't have anything good. They won't know until they waste the time.

Camouflage clothing, including parts of a ghillie suit. I don't know what *you* wear to hunt coyotes, but blinky-light sneakers and a propeller beanie aren't exactly my first choice.

There's probably a lot more, but I have to go feed the cats.

Yep, not much to say...

...on Heller that hasn't already been said.

Start here at SCOTUSblog
Then Pagan Blacksmith.
And LawDog.
More discussion back at SCOTUSblog.
Don't forget MattG.

That ought to keep everybody busy for a while.

Is there really anyone...

...so lacking in tastebuds that they actually Can't Believe It's Not Butter?

Just curious.

How not to win friends in law enforcement...

Obama campaign stop demonstrates a serious lack of respect.

I'm not surprised to see a lack of coverage in the mainstream media, but I am surprised that so few bloggers have hit on this.

WalMart Customer Service

Tonight I decided to stop by WalMart on my way to work. It's not my favorite place to shop, but there aren't a lot of places to get batteries at 11:30PM without paying $7.50 per 4-pack at the gas stations.
When I pulled in, there was a guy on crutches making his way slowly to the grocery side doors, no doubt looking forward to one of their little electric scooters to do his shopping from.
For those not familiar with WalMart's late night policies, in order to keep things from being too convenient for the customers, they lock the general merchandise side sometime after 9PM and everybody has to go through the grocery side. The two door sets have two automatic doors each, and are roughly half the width of the supercenter-size store apart, so if you're getting 50lbs of kitty litter and not planning to use a cart, you need to know which set will be open.
The guy got to the door, hesitated, and started to head back to his car. I still didn't think too much about it other than something along the lines of how much it must have sucked to go to all that effort only to realize that he has to go back to the car for something.
By this time, I was about halfway to the door. There was a roughly 2ft square piece of cardboard cut from a large box against the wall between the two sets of automatic doors, but nothing that looked out of the ordinary until I got within about 10ft of the door.
There was writing on that cardboard, in ball point pen, no less. "PLEASE USE OTHER DOORS," with an arrow pointing toward the general merchandise side.
Now, that's a pretty common message, and I'd bet there are plenty of companies out there that make nice big signs in sharply contrasting 3-inch or larger letters with that message on them that the guy could have read from the handicap parking space, but in ballpoint pen on brown cardboard, it was hard to read from just a few feet away, and didn't even look like a sign from the parking lot. Even a piece of white posterboard and a large black marker would have been readable from the parking spaces, but I guess WalMart doesn't know where to get such things.
It's not too bad of a walk for me to go to the other doors, and not too far to walk back to the car with the single bag I came out with, but for the guy on crutches, that would have been another 5-10 minutes of what certainly appeared to be painful hobbling. Is it too much to ask a company that spends millions on advertising signs throughout every store, to simply have one large black-on-yellow "PLEASE USE OTHER DOORS" sign made for each store?

Still clicking the other magic boxes...

Been fiddling with cameras lately...some more results at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kd5nrh

I think I've narrowed down the light edges on the scans to some curling of the negatives. The humidity changes between air conditioning and outside air leaking in are playing hell with flatness even on some older negs.

Looks like my next experimental film project will be home processing of color film. I might have to put it off for a bit, but it's looking more and more attractive since I can do the rest of the process (scan and print, except that I don't usually want prints of everything on the roll - I don't know what resolution they scan at for their prints, but the last bunch of photo CDs I got weren't exactly impressive) just as well as the local one-hour places. If I can get from exposed film to stable, decent negatives, I can not only save the processing costs, but avoid having a bunch of extra prints running around too.

My new scanner finally got delivered...

...next door...two hours before I had to be at work. FedEx may be fast and a lot easier on fragile items than UPS, but they've only gotten one delivery to us in three years; everything goes to the neighbors despite the sign on our gate, clearly visible from the turnoff to the neighbors' house. Fortunately I spotted the truck on its way out and jogged over there to get it. I should have done a self portrait afterwards - it's been nearly 20 years since I was any good at running, and it was 93 degrees at the time.

I only got to play with it for a little while before having to get ready for work, but here are a couple of scans (scanned at 1200dpi so this laptop wouldn't choke on the adjustments, scaled and/or cropped for easier uploading via this cellular connection) from the bike race last weekend. I left it running some 2400dpi scans of the next couple of strips, and out of curiosity I tried 4800dpi on some color negatives...it's really slow, but the quality is worth the wait. I'm almost afraid to see how long it will take on 120 negs, but it ought to look really nice.





The bottom one is cropped somewhat, and starting to show the lost resolution of the 1200dpi scan. I'll have to retry that same crop from a 4800dpi run and see how it looks.

For those keeping score, these are from Tri-X 400 pushed one stop w/TMax Developer. As the sun came up a bit more and the thin overcast got thinner, I switched to Ilford Delta Pro 100. Looking at the negs, there's a marked difference in density, but it hardly shows on the scans even before tweaking in GIMP. As I get them scanned and edited, the workable ones will make their way to Flickr.

Update to Just Give Them What They Want

By way of The War On Guns:
Store owner shot in robbery.

WTF?

BEDFORD — College student Chris Brown, 19, defeated closed captioning editor Jim Wallace, 35, for the Place 6 City Council seat Saturday, according to complete but unofficial results.

People actually edit closed captioning?  People actually admit to editing closed captioning?

No wonder he got stomped 4-to-1 by a kid.

They called it an improvement

On the county road to my house, just outside of town, there used to be a little one-lane bridge about 20ft long that had stood up for decades.  About a year ago, the county came to the conclusion that one lane bridges are bad.  They therefore took out the bridge, put in a culvert pipe and dumped dirt over the whole thing, making about a 20-30 yard dirt section in an otherwise paved road.  A couple of heavy rains later, and this is what we have:

Pics from the storm last week

Digital shot back towards Stephenville from the fron tyard during a lull in the storm.



Water over the bridge in the park.



More water over the bridge.



Fortunately, the ducks just think it's cool that they can sit around in the road without getting run over.

Playing with the camera

Testing Kodak BW400CN and the local one-hour processing places.

Unbalanced photo of an unbalanced kitty.

Road trip today

Just a couple photos from today's road trip to Brady.

The aliens are pretty safe

Well, here's the first attempt at Conservative UAW Guy's Postal Match with the .357 Blackhawk.  I'll have to try this again with the .45 once my arms stop shaking from the gas weedeater and my hits (hopefully) get less random.

Those things are pretty small from 10 yards.  OTOH, I also take comfort in a few common facts: 10 yards is the maximum range for the vast majority of defensive shootings, and those 8.5x11" sheets are roughly the size of the center-mass target area on most people.

Postal Match This Month

In light of January's events, I've just got to give this one an entry from Stephenville.

Also, keep an eye on SurplusRifleForum.com's postal match forum.

Rights vs. Entitlements

First off, let's call a spade a spade; if taxpayers are forced to fund some part of your existence that doesn't directly benefit them, you're on welfare.  It doesn't matter what other names you might call it, whether you're getting a check or just receiving some kind of free service that someone else would have to pay for, it's welfare.

Nobody argues that the second amendment entitles anyone not actively involved in defending the country to have guns provided to them at taxpayer expense.  Why then is it so hard to accept that you, and only you, are responsible for the cost of exercising your right to live?

Yes, you have a right to live; that means, with the notable exception of the extreme circumstances where deadly force is justified, you cannot legally be deprived of your life by any person or governmental entity except by due process.  It does not mean that any person or governmental entity owes you anything for your healthcare costs unless such entity has directly caused your health issues.

Scalpel keeps beating and beating and beating and beating and beating the faint smudge that might once, long ago, have been a dead horse, and a lot of people still can't get it through their heads that they are entitled to precisely nothing they have not personally earned, no matter how much they need it.  Assrot, though he's talking about illegal immigrants, pretty much sums up the welfare mentality as well.

UPDATE: A load of old shite also has a pretty good post on the topic.