Dirkus Maximus

Sorry, to anyone who checks this page on a regular basis for family news.  I have been staying pretty busy lately and in case anyone is wondering why Dirk has not posted anything recently it’s because he is busier than me.  We are both still working two jobs and Dirk is busy going to school right now.  He is doing awesome so far, all A’s for now.  He even ended up having to teach his class on Monday night.  The instructor was having a hard time explaining Trigonometry to the class.  After about 4 hours, Dirk asked if the teacher if he could give it a shot.  Got up there and sorted the class out in about 40 min.    As most of you also know by now, Dirk is not working as a trainer for Canon any longer.  He had to go back to doing tech support on the phones so that he can make it to school on time each day.  That new schedule started Monday and so far he hates the hours.  He’s not a big fan of getting up at 6am and not coming home till 1am.

As for the kids they are all doing well, the biggest thing going for them is we have Birthday’s coming up for Andy and Dirk.  I’m try to decide now what we will be doing for them, not real sure yet though.  If anyone has idea throw it out there for me.  I’ll consider it.

Lastly, I had a follow up yesterday with the Doctor after my surgery.  Everything is looking good and I have been given the all clear to lift weights again.  I’ll be starting back on that at the YMCA this evening.   Haven’t been allowed to do that for two weeks now.   Well I will end this here.  I’ll try to get Dirk to post something, if I ever see him again. 

Sunrise at Chippokes

OK, first off in my series of “holy-crap-I-need-to-catch-up” posts is a quick blurb about the holiday craft show at Chippokes. It was actually quite awesome this year, for the first two days. Then the “awesome” packed up and went home, leaving the show in a rut.

Saturday night, all hell broke loose in a big storm and several vendors were forced to pack it in and go home in the morning due to damaged product, tents and trailers. The third day was rain, followed by additional rain and some more rain. That was then followed by a feverish, ANGRY-DIRK RAGE POWERED MANHUNT for the organizer, who bolted and went to dinner for several hours without bothering to pay me for being his Excess Material Waste Relocation Technician… AKA garbage guy. I was GREATLY DISPLEASED. I don’t walk around picking up other people’s half-eaten corn dogs and funnel cakes for free, ya know. We’re talking about paying off bills and making Christmas happen for my kids here.

I did manage to finally catch him on his way back to his cabin at 7:30 that evening (we closed up shop at 2:00) and got my check. He gave me the excuse that he had been looking for my father, to give him the check. Um, yeah. I was the guy doing the work, man. Give me the check. And finding my ‘rents isn’t hard, you had their cell phone numbers. And finding them usually doesn’t involve leaving the park for “dinner” for five and a half hours. I don’t think I’ll work for him again next year. Or ever. Ass.

I don’t think the rangers at the park would want me to work that job again either, I left the park’s John Deere hauler a muddy mess after driving it at top speed all over hell’s half-acre looking for that guy, and also forgot the battery charger for it in the bathroom supply closet down by the mansion. (Sorry!)

I was not the biggest offender of the weekend though; my hat is off to you, Mr. Winebago-Driving Canadian Craft Guy, for getting your 1980’s Winebago stuck up to the rails in the lawn of the historic area, while managing to rip a hole in the ground large enough to bury 4 elephants, a team of oxen, and a small jumbo jet. Well done, sir. Bravo.

I really need to write more often. Let’s catch up on some happenings since I last posted, shall we?

Wes To The Rescue!

Wes rescued a couple stray kittens recently. They have/had some kind of intestinal infection though. The runt of the litter was adopted by a co-worker of mine, but sadly the intestinal infection got him before the vet could really do anything. One day he was running and playing, and the next he was just done. The second kitten is still in our home and getting better. Once he’s all sorted out, we’ll be looking for a home for this little guy.

Boat Races Coming Up!

The Carolina Cup Regatta is coming back to E-City on the weekend of June 6-7. Hopefully this year won’t be as oppressively hot as last year. I’ll be out there shooting with whatever gear I can check out from work. I think one gear change I’m going to make this time is that instead of a 1D series camera, I’m going to take a Rebel. Yeah, yeah, I know. Blasphemy, right? Why the hell am I going to use the super low-end consumer stuff when I can check out the pro grade equipment for free? Come ask me me that question again whenever you’ve been carting that heavy S.O.B. around your neck all damn day. I’m also gonna see if I can find a better bag for the lenses I check out. Check out the promotional video here on Youtube. If anyone wants to do a cookout thing on Saturday the 6th, let me know. My last attempt at this was rather full of fail, but if we put off the eating until after we go shooting, we might have better luck.

XBOX Party and Cookout!

Tentatively scheduled for June the 13th, I’m planning on having an XBOX 360 LAN Party and Cookout. Hit me up by email for an invite. $5 a head by the Friday before gets you steak and/or pork ribs, a baked potato, salad, deviled eggs, and more. Free coke/pepsi/whatever, BYOB if you want brewskis. I’ll need at least 2 people to bring xboxxen, 3 if we can. I’ll borrow some projectors from work.

Random Hackery

Did you know that if your kids spill even a DROP of soda on an old 2003clear-sided Mac Pro keyboard, right below the “J” key, that it will get in between the membranes and rot out the trace to the letter “M”? Did you also know that Apple used 3 odd sized torx screws and no less than a BILLION tiny screws made from incredibly soft, easy to strip out metal to hold the keyboard together? Neither did I until tonight. I also discovered however, that you can tape down a single hair-thin strand of copper from a thin stranded copper wire as a solderless jumper sandwiched between the top layer and spacing layer of the menbrane to make the key work again. The trick to this kind of repair is using little “W” bends on either end of the jumper wire so that the jumper is crossing the trace several times to ensure good contact, instead of just leaving it straight and crossing the old trace once. The More You Know, right?

Not-So-Restful Vacation

I’m taking a week off this week to work on my never-ending Honey-Do list. I’ll be around the house a bit working on things like cleaning out gutters, cleaning out the shed, cleaning out the attic, and all sorts of otehr fun crap like that. Not exactly a great time, but it has to be done. I’ll be back to work on the 1st of June.

"Sounds like someone's got a case of the MONDAYS!"

First, I threw my Newbies to the wolves this morning and had them take their first calls, then we had a loud, messy catfight right outside our classroom when a couple young “ladies” from the high-pressure timeshare call center next door had an argument, and just now we just had a bout of super-heavy 3/4″ hail. What’s next, tornadoes, earthquakes,  and the fire raining from the sky? Talk about a case of the Mondays!

But wait, there’s more! Then there was a power outage, then another huge thunderstorm dumped a microburst right on us with tropical-storm force winds and torrential rain, then someone was Doing It Wrong[TM] on Interstate 64 and managed to bungle themselves and their vehicle up so badly the police had to close all four travel lanes less than 50 feet from the exit I normally take to get home.

WTF. Seriously?

We needed a remote switch for an EOS Rebel XS for some product shots we were doing in the office, but we didn’t have one in the training department inventory. I started digging through some old boxes of cables and stuff looking for something to hack up, and this is the result:

Hell, it's still better than the controls on the new Shuffle...

This one’s pretty simple: Take an old Mac Classic mouse from before the dawn of time (I think it was busterd anyway, it didn’t even work with an ADB-to-USB adapter) and an old ADB serial cable from an old Canon PowerShot A50. Crack open the mouse, rip the adb cable out, cut the PCB traces going to the mouse button’s microswitch, cut the ADB end off the A50’s cable, solder the red and white wires to the C and NO terminals of the microswitch, jam it all back together, and shazam… the iTrigger. I left the majority of the mouse’s guts in place, including the ball. It just gives it a nice heft that makes it feel more like a quality piece of equipment instead of a quick and dirty hack job.

DO WANT.

So that's where all the goombas came from...

There’s a huge difference between US and Japanese companies. One example is Canon Japan’s new policy, from this CNN article…

In a country where 12-hour workdays are common, the electronics giant has taken to letting its employees leave early twice a week for a rather unusual reason: to encourage them to have more babies.

“Canon has a very strong birth planning program,” says the company’s spokesman Hiroshi Yoshinaga. “Sending workers home early to be with their families is a part of it.”

Japan in the midst of an unprecedented recession, so corporations are being asked to work toward fixing another major problem: the country’s low birthrate.

Japanese comanies are AWESOME.

UPDATE: Video clip of the CNN story after the jump… (more…)

My camera's back from the dead... and it hungers for BRAINS...

I posted something a couple days ago about how it was going to take over $80 to fix my SD300. I absolutely didn’t have that money to spend, and nothing to lose by tearing the gooey LCD and backlight apart to tiny shreds, so I busted out the screwdrivers and went to town.

It took me almost an hour to peel all the layers of the backlight unit apart and individually wash them in warm water with a tiny bit of dishsoap. I had to pay attention to the order, orientation, and facing of each layer to make sure I put them back right. The LCD panel was better sealed, so I simply had to take a lint-free cloth, dip it in the warm water and clean all the soda off it. Then I had to meticulously dry everything, polishing the fingerprints and smears off of all of it. I reassembed it all, re-installed it in the camera, and powered it on.

It worked.

I can honestly say that I have no idea what in the hell customers do to their cameras that they get so badly broken. This camera has been dropped numerous times, been left out in the rain (in it’s case, luckily), had sopping wet towels thrown on it, been carried in Wes’s overnight bag of a purse with various implements of destruction, been taken on a field trip by my son when he was 9, carried in my pants pocket next to my Gerber plier tool and all it’s nice pointy edges, had an orange soda poured in it, and now it’s been more or less disassembed so that no part was touching another and reassembeled TWICE, and it SURVIVED.

And people say Canon makes shitty products. Whatever. I KNOW better, and I have pictures (and the camera that took them) to prove it.

OOOooohhh… Lookit what I got…

2.4 Gigs of buggy Microsoft beta software!

I can already tell you that MSIE 8 sucks horribly at rendering web pages with lots of CSS, it makes the sidebar on my site look like scrambled gibberish. I’ll test it some more (in a virtual machine, of course) and give my opinions on it later this week. Wish me luck!

First it was Lance and his coverage of MacWorld, now it’s Andy and his coverage of CES! Andy “I <3 Balls” M. is heading out to Vegas to represent Canon and do a bit of spying fact finding at CES 2009. He’ll canvassing the exhibition hall floor looking for anything interesting, and posting pictures over at his CES 2009 Blog. Again, Canon’s footing the bill on this trip and the rest of us just get to sit in the office and live vicariously though the lucky bastard’s posts. :-/ The other interesting tidbit is that AVN 2009 (Link totally and completely not safe for work in any way shape or form) will be happening that same week, just a few blocks away. That should make for one interesting week in Vegas… a convention center full of basment dwelling gadget geeks just a couple blocks from a convention center full of… umm… “Talent” from “The Industry”. The swag bags should be epic.

One of my co-workers, Lance “The iLancePro” G., will be posting his experience at the last worthwhile MacWorld Expo over at his new site, SteveBailed!. The best part for him is that Canon’s footing the bill for the trip! They don’t send me anywhere, they know darn well they can’t take me out in public. Especially after that once incident with the ice cream and the wait staff singing to the IT department director and his staff in front of those vendors…

As you may (or may not) have heard, His Royal Steveness, CEO of Apple, has backed out of the spotlight at the expo and has asked his right-hand-man Phil Schiller to take over that task. This is pretty sobering news, considering ongoing reports of His Steveness not being in the best of health. Apple then dealt the double-whammy of saying that this will be the last MacWorld they will be attending. WHAT?! I give the organizers of the show maybe one more year, then the show will go belly up. It’s scary times for the Apple fanboy masses, and for the stockholders.

A busy desk is a sign of a busy mind... oh who am I kidding, this is a trainwreck.

Two printers, three computers, two camcorders, three barplugs, two coffee mugs, eleventy billion cables of varying size and function, and no idea where the f*ck my pen is hiding.

SECRET KEYWORD TO GET MY DRINK TICKETS: “Has you seen mah bukkit?”

Update: Lance won the tickets! His iPhone saved the day. Sorry the live feed never worked, There was something funny going on with my web cam, and we had a line of people forming already so I couldn’t work on it. We were SUPPOSED to take pictures from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm, but it ended up being more like 6:45 pm to 9:15 pm.

I was shooting the 5D Mk II with a 24-70 2.8L on it. I promise I’ll photoshop all the black dots out.   I was shoting the pictures in both large fine JPEG and sRAW1 (11mp raw), if you want the image files, shoot me an email at work. I hope to have things printed before I go on vacation next week. I’ve got a total of 152 shots, that need to be printed in pairs of 5X7’s. That’s 304 prints. I’ll be burning through some serious ink and paper. I may even go so far as to downsize all of them and throw them up on the sample Canon Image Gateway Account I’ll be handing out the credentials to for the Canon Image Gateway labs. I’d post them here, but God only knows what kind of shitstorm that would start.

I know, I know, I haven’t written in a while. I have stretches where I think “Man, I should blog this” but never do. Anyhow, Just wanted to check in with some random bits of news.

• Thanksgiving went well, all both of them. We did Turkeyday at my ‘rents house, then did the Saturday after at Wes’s ‘rents house. Food was delicious at both. Wes and Ashley both came down with a funky stomach bug Sunday, but I’m not sure what they ate that I didn’t; mainly because I ate some of EVERYTHING.
• My Dad’s birthday is coming up, and I still have no freaking clue what to get him. Any suggestions from the peanut gallery for a retiree who likes to chill out in front of the TV most of the day with the Travel Channel and Maury? Maybe I could get him out of that chair once in a while with a Wii, or a refurbed PS2 with DDR…
• I managed to score myself a pretty sweet little set of photographic strobes second hand from The Lance. This, combined with the crazy K-Mart “Focus” tripod with roughly eleventy thousand points of articulation I got at a charity auction at work, and the Yashica Model A Twin-Lens Reflex camera I bought some time ago from Liz, and I almost have a studio. Now I just need some cheap 120 B&W roll film, some developing hardware and chemicals, and I’ll be all set to start screwing around with photography old-school style.
• We put up our Christmas tree. We ended up calling the old artificial tree out of retirement for this year. The kids really had their hearts set on a real tree, but finances dictated otherwise. The base on it was busted all to hell, but some duct tape and a tree stand from the thrift store up the street fixed that. Duct tape: Making your holidays better, one festive silver strip at a time.
• No mass-produced crappy ornaments for the tree this year! With three schoolage kids, we now have more than enough handmade ornaments to cover the whole thing in hand-crafted goodness. This year’s tree includes classic favorites such as “Snow-Bob Square-Man”, “The Scotch Tape Angel”, “Pirate Claus” and “The Christmas Yetis”
• Addy had Wes rolling a couple days ago. She asked Wes if they could have coffee and donuts for breakfast, Wes said “No, why do you want coffee and donuts?” Addy replied in a very matter-of-fact tone “I want to practice being a cop.”
• A while back some friends of ours, Barb and Greg, had to take their kids and nothing but the clothes on their backs and leave their home back due to mold. You might remember me saying something about it. Well, they’re trying to see if ABC’s “Extreme Home Makover” can do anything to help. I’m giving them a hand with the video portion of the application. I also put them in for the FM99 Christmas wish fund. They’ve figured out how to get things right. The bad news, it’s the worst possible outcome. They’re going to have to pay off the entire mortgage and an equity loan before they can even THINK about tearing down the house and rebuilding. The nice thing is that the City of Chesapeake is giving them an exception to tear down and build a new place even though they’re on less than three acres (there’s a zoning law against it) and a contractor they’re friends with is willing to build them a home and only charge them for materials; the labor will be pro bono. But now they’re stuck. The insurance won’t cover anything but two sheets of drywall that were damaged by some rainwater at some point, totalling $500 for materials and labor to repair that. Never mind the rest of the freaking house, right? You can read their whole story (and how to give them some help) at http://www.smitheieio.com
• Wes and I will be handling the portraits at the Canon ITS Holiday Gala this year. She’ll be working crowd control, and I’ll be snapping pictures at a furious pace. I think I might fall back and use the 50D this year, though I am kind of tempted to try and sneak the 5d Mk II out for a night on the town. Don’t count on me shooting my own version of “Reverie” on it though.
• The 2007 Toyota Yaris hatchback has enough room in the back to haul just under a quarter of a cord of firewood if you put the back seats down. She also wallows around corners like a drunken sow and has the stopping distance of a fully loaded coal train with that load.
• Wes still can’t start a fire in the woodstove without the aid of half a phone book worth of paper, a large barrel full of pinecones, and a blowtorch. On the other hand, I finally broke my month long streak of one-match fires today and had to resort to using a second match. I will teach her one day, I swear.

That’s about it for now. Check out some pics of the strobes I got from Lance and the Christmas tree after this link… (more…)

This grill/smoker/turkey fryer all-in-one combo was supposed to be my 5 year anniversary gift from Canon. I think UPS took one look at this package, and decided to run it over repeatedly with a small herd of elephants. The box was demolished, parts were dented, the paint was chipped off, there’s water and rust streaks, the lava rocks were crushed into a fine powder and were pouring out of the box and coating everything inside, most of the assembly hardware was missing, the handles were missing, and someone decided to toss in three random pieces of wood that aren’t even supposed to BE in the kit. I’m guessing someone else’s smoker/grill is in similar condition, and they’re missing some of the wood they were supposed to get. This is my ANGRY DIRK FACE: >:-( Click the thumbnails to see the images full size.

I’ve lost about $3000 from my 401K since the month began. There are people in the office who have lost 5 digits in the same time period. I seem to remember saying a while back that we were in for a financial crash because of the idiocy in the mortgage market, among other things. Oh yeah, I did… BACK IN JANUARY.

I think I’ll start publishing my own stock predictions, and make a mint that way.

“It makes my head explode… especially when you say numbers.”

–Wes, after I tried “test-firing” my Mac Network Tier Two training lecture on her.

You can take a look at my notes for the course right here (.DOC format). Makes great reading material if you’re trying to sleep.

Evidence of the world's first TDD rickroll, recovered from the trash next to the TDD at work. Click to enlarge.

I think this may have been a world’s first. Does anyone have evidence of a prior teletype rickroll? Also, there’s another special message on that same sheet from the night before the rickroll. Props to Jason for giving me the TDD to play with, John for recovering the paper, and Phil for getting pics of the reaction as it happened (I’ll post those tomorrow). Video after the jump… (more…)

The setup in the picture above costs significantly more than my HOUSE. That’s an XL-H1S, 2x tele-extender, EF-XL adapter, and the 1200mm f/5.6 EF lens. We could read the “NO SOLICITING” sign on a business halfway around Greenbrier Circle with it. The lens shown here is only the second one ever made, out of a total production of about 9 or so. They cost close to $90,000.00 new, and you had to order them and pay up front, and Canon would build it over the next three years and deliver it to you. The front few elements take 7 MONTHS to cure properly in an annealing oven. Sad thing is that this one was loaned out to Sports Illustrated, who apparently dropped it and cracked a chunk out of the edge of the frontmost element, then proceeded to pull a common customer manuver by saying “I dunno WHAT happened, it wasn’t like that when we put it away!” Never mind the dents and flat spots on the lens hod and all, right S.I.? The lens is on loan to us temporarily from our friends up at the home office in New York. Thanks guys!

The camera hanging off the back is an XL-H1s, a $9,000.00 high-definition professional camcorder. It’s none too shabby either.

Peep the gallery with more pics below.

Oh, and yes, that’s a hand-built pre-production sample of the Rebel XS in some of the pictures in the gallery too, probably the only one in Virginia, and likely one of a only dozen or so in the entire US. I love my job. (more…)

I’m live tonight at HiScore in Chesapeake for Trevis’ birthday headshot blowout. I’m broadcasting live for the event, and taking pics as time allows. Hit up the DirkCam for LIVE VIDEO. (also available after the jump) We’ll be here from midnight till 8am Saturday.

This place has a pretty tight setup, and the gaming chairs they have are pretty wild. Lots of nice flatscreens and pretty much every console ever made. There’s an Atari 2600 behind me with a stack of games next to it. Seriously.

UPDATE: Well, we didn’t quite make it to 8am. We were slowly losing people throughout the night, and around 6am we decided to call it quits. It was pretty intense, with a lot of Rainbow 6, Call of Duty and some other war games like that. There was a short round of Halo 3, but that ended pretty quick once Lance and I started wiping the floor with everyone. Still, everyone had a good time shooting people in the head. I borrowed the Powershot S70 from work, and used the intervalometer on it to make the animation you see below.