Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Playing with the camera at the Audubon Society, on a cloudy day

Went to the Audubon, set my tripod and my laundry hamper (as a table) in the back of my truck, and used my computer to control the camera as I took a bazillion shots with both of my lenses.

This photo was the 50mm lens with a polarizing filter, f22, 1/4 second exposure, ISO 100

As I went through them it seemed a long exposure / small aperture was giving me the richest color to start with.



After hacking my way through the Canon software to adjust the picture:

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

First Night Sky Shoot

With the nice camera I bought used from Missy...

This actually seems grainy and over-exposed to me.
f/3.5
18mm
iso 1600
20 seconds

So next time I want to try a series of shots with lower iso (400 and 800), and vary the exposures with those in the 10, 15, 20, and even 30 second ranges.
There's also some red, purple, and other spots...which I guess are the kind of artifacts in this type of photo shooting you normally have to cleanup on a computer afterwards. (The random ones, not the airplanes about 1/4 of the way up from the bottom)


Of course it will have to be "next time" since when I was done I dropped the camera off the tripod (just plain inexperience combined with working in the dark)...camera seems OK but the $300 Tamron lens did not survive. Ouch. :cry:. New one ordered by Amazon for Thursday delivery :/

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

A few songs








UConn Costs

Just leaving this here so I can find it in the future:

1996 v. 2015 (yeah, 19 years...couldn't find the data online to do an even 20).

Storrs Enrollment:
1996: 9,862 undergrads, 87% Connecticut residents
2015: 13,796 undergrads, 75% Connecticut residents

Increase of 7,000 students...4,000 more from CT and 3,000 from outside the state.

Inflation (CPI) rate from 1996 to 2015: 66%

Increase in UConn Revenue (academic side) 1996 to 2015, per student: 188%

Increase in UConn tuition and fees paid by students, 1996 to 2015, per student: 271%

So in raw numbers we are educating more students from Connecticut at UConn today than a generation ago.

Still, I'm worried about the effect of increasing spending at three times the rate of inflation and increasing tuition at four times the rate of inflation.

That leaves the upper middle class which can still pay the bills OK and it leaves working class students that can get financial assistance OK, but what is it doing the the middle class students?

http://www.oir.uconn.edu/UC_Fact_Sheets/UConn_Facts_1997.pdf
http://oire.uconn.edu/UConn_Facts_2015_Final.pdf

Monday, August 22, 2016

Mom's Birthday

As I continue cleaning up my photos... Working from home that morning I sit down at my desk and look at the window, "Well hello there!"


Cindy & Karen took mom (and me) out on a boat. I wasn't able to get a pic where they were all looking at the same thing at the same time, which probably speaks volumes :D


Oh.my.gawd...mother is taking off a layer when on a boat?!?! I'd say hell has frozen over but that implies the temperature going in the wrong direction.





The traditional trip to the Little Red Cottage on my Birthday

Packed up and ready to leave...just this darn workday in between...

The most Sam face ever during rainy evening karaoke...

Although it only rained for a few minutes as the front came through, it was too rough to launch the kayak on Friday or Saturday. Sunday though dawned beautifully.


Off the tip of West Island

After circumnavigating the island (probably around a four mile paddle) it was time to drop anchor and just lay back in the kayak and enjoy the motion of the ocean.

And look up at the clouds :)


I took Thursday off to go pick up the kayak...and relax again.


Also tried for the first time the set of wheels Ed gave me which came from his canoe:

Remembering Hartley

(Written a couple Saturdays ago, just getting around to posting it so I can find it in the future.)

I attended the memorial today for Hartley, who passed away earlier this summer after a brief battle with cancer. He’s the first person who I’ve been inside a burning building, on air, with who has died.

It was 96, with humidity to match, outside — even more inside the Depression-era church my Grandmother helped raise the money to build, which is perhaps fitting because my first memory of Hartley is from a cub scout pool party at his house. To date myself, a few years later as Webelos we piled into the back of his pickup for the 25 mile trip to scout camp.

He first started running calls as a 12 year old tagging along with his dad, who served a brief but pivotal tenure as Fire Chief following World War II when our fire company lost half its membership but gained a sense of limitless ability to improve that would carry it forward for the next fifty years.

His sons gave a pair of well done eulogies. His younger son Dave, who was never a firefighter but worked in a fire-related family business, intertwined fire company, family, and community starting off after the introductory statements with, “Rockwood nozzle,” and concluding with “He would say if you had a difficult problem in life take a deep breath, think about the situation, and use Class A foam.”



His older son Bob is a long time training officer for the Manchester, New Hampshire fire department. He started by recalling a Gordon Graham video he’s played hundreds of times over the years when Gordon recalls excitedly telling his dad he had just gotten his first job, which would include sweeping floors. Gordon’s dad replies, “Well, let’s go downstairs so I can teach you how to sweep floors.”

While the broad theme was there is a right way, and wrong way, and Hartley’s way (which almost always was the right way) it wasn’t a metaphor for me since I still remember the day many years ago Hartley, while he was still Deputy Chief, grabbed one push broom and handed me the other and said, “If the trucks aren’t in the bays but you are, it’s time to sweep.”


A couple photos in my odd preference for candid people and things
At the meal afterwards...my mom & Rudy who've known each other at least since High School...
And although my Fusion never parked next to Hartley's ride at a fire or the station...it is the last time one of my vehicles will be next to his.

Millbury...without the the old T&G Presses

Best job & best team I worked for was the five years at the Telegram & Gazette from 2000 to 2005.

(Although I'm pondering whether I am saying that out of some sort of Stockholm Syndrome / Dysfunctional Enablement type of way.)

The T&G long since stopped publishing in Millbury, the Globe having taken over the plant as it's "Specialty Products" printing plant. While I knew the Globe was moving it's urban (Dorchester) plant and had previously closed it's suburban plant (Billerica) as over-capacity, I had never considered the possibility Millbury would consolidate there too. Moving the Dorchester printing plant allowed the Globe to move it's offices to smaller leased space in Boston so it can sell the old Dorchester complex.

The T&G is printed at Gatehouse Media's Auburn, MA plant -- since long before Gatehouse bought them. The Norwich Bulletin is printed there too, along with a number of other small New England papers.

How sad it is to seem the empty space - when I first saw the presses they were only about 10 years old and among the most state of the art ones in New England, with the plant having a terrific reputation for efficiency. It is hard to describe how amazing it is to watch a printing plant in operation in person, the movies and T.V. shows don't do it justice.





One of the juxtapositions of the newspaper industry is while much of the content was created that day, the big rolls of paper had to be in the plant for three months before they were used in order for the humidity between all the rolls to stabilize. If you spliced in a roll that was a different moisture content it would have a different tear strength than the end of the paper roll already threaded through the press and bad things would happen!

Saturday, August 6, 2016

Perkele

https://www.facebook.com/veryFinnishproblems/videos/741534235987166/