A still-life with some black beans and rice

I’ve gotten well into my Summer of Code project, and it’s been taking up a lot of my time.  I’m progressing pretty well on the Rockbox theme editor I’m building, and it’s been a lot of fun to watch it take shape as I put the pieces together.  I’ve found that the nice thing about working from home without a schedule is that I can mix up my hours like crazy: on a typical day I’m working from 1:00-5:00 in the afternoon…and then 12:00-4:00 in the morning.

Other than that, I’ve been having lots of fun hanging out with the Danie and just relaxing.  I’ve had plenty of time to do my assorted nerd activities, like tearing apart my old Lego Mindstorms RCX brick and scavenging it for parts.  My new goal for the next couple of weeks is to fit the Lego Mindstorms wires with molex connectors, and build an Arduino shield so I can plug all my Mindstorms pieces into the Arduino and use it as a replacement for the old (now broken, after a couple years in my trunk) RCX brick.  Designing a PCB is turning out to be something of a scary task for an electronics noob like myself, but I’m getting there.

I also bought an old rotary phone at an Antique store, and I’ve managed to get it wired up so that I can pick up and dial out with it, although the ringer isn’t working.  At least I’ve got it working more or less, now I just need to find a phone line splitter so I can keep it plugged in alongside a phone that actually rings.

Today I had an idea for a photo (seen above), so I whipped up a quick yin-yang pattern in GIMP, printed it, set it on a plate, and arranged some rice and beans for the black and white fill.  I’m pretty happy with the photo, and it was a fun diversion for a little while.  Now, speaking of food, it’s time to go make some popcorn and watch a movie.

A photograph of some water bottles.

It’s Summer now, and I’m all finished up with my second year of University.  Since then I’ve been working on my schedule (working out my classes so I can commute next year), starting a Summer internship, and just generally relaxing and enjoying home.

Over the last week I attempted to work a regular nine to five from home, but rearranging my sleep schedule just wasn’t working, so I’ve settled for staying up and coding all hours of the night, then getting up and putting in a couple of hours in the afternoon.

Today I noticed that my dad had a whole mess of water bottles set out on the counter, and I just had to photograph them.  I wondered what it would look like to shine a light in at the bottom of them, so I went ahead and stuck a flash in at the bottom of the group, along with another one to light the tops, and made some photos of them.

Aside from the occasional bursts of activity and working, I’ve got a pretty much lazy Summer, especially with my discovery of Netflix Instant.  That, and Rocko’s Modern Life reruns, which I need to go watch now…

Danie with one of the ducklings

Today was Easter, and it was a good one.   I got up nice and early (hooray for running on less than five hours sleep) and went to church to run video for three services straight.  Danie sang at the end of each service, and she was great, and I got some decent video of the whole thing.  After that I went with my mom and sister for brunch at a nifty cafe down the street called Alpha Omega.  It’s a Christian coffee-shop/cafe, and they’ve got a really great bunch of food, including the best chickpea hummus I’ve ever had.

Then I got to slip in an episode of 24 on the Wii (Netflix instant play is quite possibly one of mankind’s greatest inventions) while Danie had lunch, and we had dinner together with my dad and sister.  After that, we got a packet of construction paper and put together a quick little barnyard scene.  We have a bunch of chicks and ducklings now, so the plan was to pose them on the fake barnyard.  The chicks were relatively cooperative, but the ducklings not so much.  So I ended up with only a single kind of good shot of a duckling on the set, but I managed to get a nifty dark shot of Danie holding one, so all was not lost on the duck front.  Now we’ve got the rest of Easter to spend watching TV and being lazy…

Natasha on the pier

Today I got a chance to photograph a friend from high school out at Coquina Beach.  I wanted to try some shots on an old dilapidated pier, and we did some shots in the nearby foliage as well, while waiting for the sun to go down.  The wind was nasty, but thankfully the city had provided some warning signs (telling us to stay off the pier, of course) that I was able to use to fasten a light stand down with an umbrella so it wouldn’t blow away.

The shots on the pier worked out pretty well, and I just wish that I’d had some more lights and/or an assistant to work with.  The one SB-25 I had for a mainlight wasn’t reaching very far at f/4.0 and ISO 200 through an umbrella, so I had to position the model on the same side of the pier as the light, looking over out-of-frame instead of back towards the center of the pier, like I would have preferred.  All told, though, it worked pretty well, and I didn’t have to deal with the massive battery packs (and expense, of course) that bigger lights bring with them.  I’m going to have to try and make a beauty dish later to get a little better efficiency against the sun.

A shot from the nearby foliage

Earlier in the day, I went and had lunch with Danie at Ferraro’s, a pizza place downtown, that turned out pretty well.  Then we hung out for a while, and I dropped her off to go shoot.  Afterwards I went to Taco Bell to grab some dinner, and ran into a guy I kickboxed with there.  Then it was back to pick up the Danie, and now she’s just Internetting (yes, I made it a verb) while I write this.  Now it’s time to go make some french fries.

Ms. Skunk exploring the bathroom

School’s finally out for Spring Break.  That means plenty of time to lie around the house doing nothing, stay up late, and sleep in just as long as I feel like.  And then I’ll see if I can do a few productive things along the way, like making a Facebook app and some photographs.  Today, my dad was apparently facilitating the sale of a skunk, and now she’s ended up spending the night here.  I grabbed some photos of her, me, and my sister and girlfriend today, and generally just had a great time hanging out with a skunk.

She  was awfully big and fat, and generally seemed a lot like a dog.  Except a dog that’s a lot like a cat.  She acted a lot like a dog, but she was a lot more cat-sized, not to mention the fluffy tail.  The claws, however, were pure dog.  And then of course there’s the snout, which isn’t really quite like anything on a cat or a dog, just her own distinctive skunk snout.

Steffi and Danie petting the skunk

Other than that, I’ve been doing lots of lazing around and hanging out with the Danie.  We went and saw Old Dogs at the dollar theatre today, which was actually a pretty decent movie.  After that I got to exercise the new stove we’ve got at home by making a lentil soup for Danie, and a curried split pea stew for me.  I attempted to steam some rice while I was at it, but managed to completely botch that.  Now it’s off to sleep, before another day of wonderful laziness.

One of the singers on stage at the memorial

Today I got up bright and early Saturday morning to get over to the Church, where they were hosting a memorial service for the local Haitian churches, in the wake of the recent earthquake.  Of course, the service started late, so the waking up early was in vain, but it still felt like quite the accomplishment to actually be somewhere just after seven.

We ran video for the entire event (which ran almost four hours), mostly because we were expecting them to fill more rooms than just the sanctuary, so we’d need the feed.  When the time actually came, they only filled about half of the sanctuary, so there was really no need for the video feed, but now we have it recorded (minus a couple of seconds that I managed to drop from the recording by mashing the wrong button on the switcher).

Some of the singers on stage

We ran two cameras, three at times when we got someone to go down and run one handheld, and generally just hung out in the video room, listening to the parts of the service that were in English and chatting amongst ourselves.  For the service they had at least five or six different speakers, with music from time to time.  They prayed for Haiti, talked about its future, and so on.

Louis posing in front of the tech graveyard

In the offtime, I got Louis to pose in front of the assorted mess that we’ve accumulated in the back of the video room, and lit a quick portrait of him.  The racks of junk made for an interesting gobo for my background light, and the random tripod worked well for posing I think.

After the service, I went with Danie to my grandparents’ house for lunch, and tried a Gardenburger (not the black bean variety), which I have to say I’m not terribly fond of.  It was alright for lunch, though, and there were some tasty breakfast bars to be had as well.

After that, it was back home with Danie to watch some According To Jim DVDs and order pizza, which arrived just a couple of minutes ago.  Now that it should be sufficiently cooled off, I guess it’s time to eat it.

The dinner table on Christmas Eve

Yesterday was Christmas!  On Christmas Eve, I went with my mom’s side of the family to a candlelight service, and then we all had dinner at the grandparents’ house.  I made some vegetable and chick-pea curry, and had some assorted vegetables and such that other folks had brought.  And Grandma made a wonderful pumpkin pie.  I set up and shot family portraits while I was there, which proved interesting, as I worked with Grandpa’s 5D Mark II, and forgot that its maximum sync speed was 1/250.  So now I’ve just finished processing the photos, and cropping the black sync bars off the bottoms of every frame.  After that and dinner we had the gift exchange, which was one of those where everyone draws a number out of a hat, and then you each pick a present in the order of your numbers, with the option to take someone else’s after your turn.

Then Christmas day, I got to go with Danielle’s family for lunch, after I exchanged presents with my dad and sister, and Danie and her family.  Then we headed back to my place for dinner, and we had baked beans, bean soup, another curry dish, bread, and assorted vegetables and such.  I got to exchange presents with dad’s side of the family, and then Danie and I went off to see “It’s Complicated,” which was, well, a complicated movie.  It was amusing, but the ending wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.  After the movie we went and played Mad Gab and Buzzword with Danie’s family, and then it was home to sleep.

Now it’s today, Boxing Day.  I got up nice and late, played a video game some, and went to Taco Bell for lunch.  Then I met up with Danie and some friends, had hot cocoa, and took Danie for Outback.  Now I’m just getting the photos post-processed, and then it’s time to go empty the dish washer, watch some TV, and get ready for bed.

Danie singing at band practice

Christmas is approaching, and Winter has been a lot of fun so far.  I got to see Avatar with some friends yesterday, which turned out to be amazing.  The 3D visuals were pretty impressive, and the story was interesting, if not completely original.  Now everyone’s coming back home for Christmas, and it was mostly nice to be able to go see it with friends who’ve been off at school for the last year.

Danie and Adrienne singing at practice

I’ve been working for the last couple of weeks on a project to set up a web server to digitally archive video files for the church, but that one sort of hit a snag when we found out that the old computer I’d volunteered to be used as the server won’t turn on anymore.  So now that project is more or less canceled, and I’m thinking I’ll probably spend the rest of the break learning Ruby On Rails, or something similarly interesting.  In the meantime, we’ve at least managed to start recording the sermon videos digitally, although there are still some sound issues to work on.

Today I took Danie to her band practice, and got a chance to photograph them while they were playing, and experiment with lights.  The practice was fun to watch, and I think I got some pretty decent shots out of it.  The ambient was pretty bright in the room they were practicing in, but I managed to blast it away pretty decent with my strobes.

Otherwise, I’ve just been hanging around and enjoying being home.  I’ve been able to sleep in every day, which is wonderful.  Everyone (myself included) seems to be getting a little bit sick lately, but that will go away soon enough.  We’ve got a gingerbread house in the works, but so far it’s just a couple of balls of dough in my fridge.  We’ve made french fries galore, and even had hot cocoa a couple of nights ago.  In fact, I think I’ll go make some more of that now.

Santa Danie

This weekend I got to come home nice and early on Thursday, and I get to hang around until Monday evening.  I’ll get to go and take exams Tuesday and Wednesday, and then the Fall semester is finally over, and I can stop worrying about stupid projects at last.  In the meantime, I get to relax, and of course study for the bunch of exams I have to take in a couple of days.  Thursday I went and picked Danielle up from USF, and we had lunch and came home in time to make small group, and then went and had dinner at Vertori’s…where  I managed to devour a large pizza by myself.  Friday I got to sleep in, but the cat woke me up around eleven, so I didn’t waste too much of the day away.

Friday was the fourth of the month, of course, so it was Danie and I’s 8/3 anniversary.  We made lentil soup for lunch, and went to Five Guys for dinner.  We made a batch of french fries earlier in the day, and that night we went to Lov-a-da coffee for karaoke.  It’s a pretty cool coffee shop, and karaoke was fun.  Saturday I got to sleep in again (later this time).  Danie and I tried to make a batch of chips, which didn’t turn out so well, so we just went ahead and made some fries again.  We tried to go to Mar Vista, but found it closed, so we just ate our leftover lentil soup and watched TV for a while.

Then today, Sunday, I went and ran video at church like usual.  I got some sync cables soldered together for my new set of radio triggers (I traded in the Pocket Wizards for Radio Popper JrX’s), which means I can adjust my flash power remotely when shooting with them now.  I got Danie a Santa hat, and we went over to GT Bray park to try them out.  I shot a couple of portraits, and then we went to the dollar theater to see “Surrogates.”  And now we’re back home, and I’ve typed up a blog entry.

Friday was time for Danie and I’s black Friday tradition, going to Busch Gardens and then the drive-in.  The movie selection turned out to be surprisingly enjoyable: Planet 51 and 2012, neither of which were nearly as bad as I expected.  I dare say, Planet 51 was amusing, and 2012 was at least marginally enjoyable.  Then come Saturday, I slept.  A lot.  Got up about 2:00 in the afternoon and had lunch, then I watched Saw V with Danie, and did some homework.  We went to Tequila Beach for karaoke, but there was a band playing the place instead, so we just had dinner and watched TV the rest of the night.

Dark Boo

Today I ran camera at church like usual, and Danie and I had lunch at Five Guys (also like usual).  She opened up another door of the Advent calendar we picked up (which doesn’t have a story in it), and we watched Miracle on 34th Street and went to dinner.  Somewhere along the line I spotted the cat on the desk with the light streaming in through the blinds onto him, so I had to grab a photograph.  And now here I am, uploading it and writing a blog post…