rob's blog

We had our first decent rain last night and since it have been very dry and warm, I woke up to some thick, for us land locked folks, fog this morning.

Here is a picture of one of the Grant MacEwan University Towers on the City Center Campus, the building has three sets of towers like this located at all of the streets that intersect with the main building. An item you will not miss on the skyline.

Getting out of my vehicle this morning there was the "Easter Bunny" hanging out in the parking lot, in the middle of downtown. I am fairly sure there is a family of bunnies living around there somewhere as I see them regularly.

Walking out to my vehicle today it was a clear spring (finally) day and there were some nice "cotton candy" clouds in the sky, I captured this shot.

Playing around with my off camera flash using an SB-600 and SU-800 Commander module, I took this picture of some fish my daughter had made at school that were hanging in my office, with the lights on (2 - 4 ft fluorescent fixtures). I used a small aperture of f/16 and a shutter speed of 1/160s with the flash in manual mode putting out 1/128 power and manually zoomed to 85mm to give a nice narrow beam at a relatively close range (1.5 ft maybe), the same can be accomplished with a snoot but I could not find mine.

So we are getting ready to move to a new location at work, so what do you do with the fellow employees collection of a years worth of Tim Horton's coffee cups? Well we tried stacking them to see how high we could go, as we have a 40 ft ceiling in the office, but that number of cups is so heavy the stack starts to bend a twist on itself, so after laying it down on the floor we decided to twist it into a circle, it now sits as the entrance "portal" to our area (we have attached a moving sticker to it to see if it makes it to the new area),

It was a tough challenge this weekend for the Tips From The Top Floor: Weekend Challenge. The subject was "swing", and since we just got yet another dump of snow not much swinging going on in the parks, so what to do? Well I built a "digital swing", the lighted LED "swings" from side to side.

While going through an old memory card holder I cam across this little "gem", and original Nikon branded memory card that cam with my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 5000. Just for a note, the picture I took of the card with my new camera, can just barely fit on this card, RAW file was 17.8 MB, couldn't even fit 2 RAW photos off my current camera on this card.

Odds are that if you have not yet had the "joy" of loosing a valuable file, you will. It is all a part of working with computers, it does not matter what OS you may use, the fact of the matter is something will happen, and you will lose at least a file, and at most all your files.

When people come to me with this problem, I always ask "Can't you get it from your backup?" This is usually the point where people get the "dear in the headlights" look. I know it is trite, and computer people like to talk about it (and even some of them don't do it at home), you have to have a backup. Back in the "old days" we used to use tape for backup, heck it is still used today but only in very large data centers, home users have much cheaper options.

First some rules of backup:

1. Backup Often, daily is best, once a week is gambling
2. A file is not safe until it exists in at least 3 places (local, local backup, off-site backup)
   

I was doing some testing on full HD video (a blog post later about that) and the clip I was testing on had this photographer in the front row of a press conference taking pictures.

Obviously this guy has NEVER held an SLR type camera, as you can see by the red arrow, that is where the shutter button is to take pictures, best part is, is that the guy is moving his hand like he is snapping away and the foley artists have the shutter click going with his motions.