Incidents and accidents

Unless you geek out with other photographers on a regular basis, you never know what it is to be ’shot’. I was testing out my new XT when I happened across a katydid. The kit lens it came with has a minumum focal distance of about 6-8 inches or so. I was checking to see how close I could get with the lens and still get a good shot, nice and sharp. DavidB (my photo-geeking) friend who was out with me, enjoyed it so much that he took a picture of me taking a picture of the bug! He just got them back a few days ago, so we had a nice laugh today.

Happy Turkey day to all of you Americans out there! I slept in this morning, as I didn’t have to go to work. I usually get up at 7:30am, but I slept in today until 8:30am. Wahoo! Poor John is catching the crud and was up some of the night, so he slept in until about 11am, far later than he usually does. I puttered around online some, then I pestered Meggie in MSN. She told me that dad was on, with a webcam! I chatted with him and my stepmom for a good hour online. i really really need to get a better webcam. I’m still using one that Larry gave me years ago. It’s oooollld. It was a great Thanksgiving morning though.
John and I made a tiny 2lb turkey breast. It’s our first Thanksgiving alone, so we had fun with it. No major catastrophes either. It baked well. We also made stuffing, green beans, Mac & Cheese (because I LOVE it), and added some gravy and cran sauce in too. John likes the cran a lot, but I’m not such a big fan. We set up our folding table in the computer room (away from the TV), and just had a nice sit down, talking about this and that. I’m so stuffed I don’t even want to look at more food. We even made Stumpy a plate of her own, but she hasn’t touched it yet.
While I was waiting for the turkey to bake, I got bored and did a small edit to the site. I got tired of crickie.com looking like Greg’s site. I mean, he and I are both using the same theme, so it’s expected. It turns out that it’s one of the more common themes used, and I kept running into ti. So I tweaked mine a little to give it a more unique feel. I tried brown first, but it just didn’t work. So.. now crickie.com is back to being blue. It was blue and orange for 5 years, and it’s blue again. Only it’s a winter blue. I think I may have fun with the seasons thing and do a fun flowery spring one when spring rolls around. My only issue right now is that the new colors aren’t reflected in the WPG2 pages. I’ll have to get Greg to tell me what I’m screwing up.

Shot number 1 and shot number 12 from the brand new Rebel XT. Obviously, I need a lot more practice. Just goes to show you, it’s not the camera that makes a good photographer.

Status: In Transit - On Time
Scheduled Delivery: Oct 21, 2005
Shipped to: ATHENS, GA, US
Shipped or Billed on: Oct 18, 2005

Tracking Number: 1Z 149 X34 03 1423 102 5
Service Type: GROUND
Weight: 5.50 Lbs
Note: Your package is in the UPS system and is on time with a scheduled delivery date of Oct 21, 2005.

It’s mine. Mine mine mine. Allll mine now. Bwah hah hah. It will be here in 3-4 days! The Princess Daisy costume sold for $46 and the Princess Peach costume sold for $96, giving me just enough to swing the ‘buy it now’ for the camera plus shipping. Once the lady who bought the pixietails pays me on November 1st, I can get extra memory and batteries, maybe a big lens.
This comes a good bit to a bad weekend. I was sick all yesterday. Running a fever of 101. My normal body temp is 96, so a fever that high is pretty darn rare for me. I had painful skin all through yesterday and most of last night, but I woke up this morning feeling better. I have to keep an eye on it though because if i continue to have a fever, I have to call in to work. No one with a fever is allowed. BrianL, his girl Lori, Stephen, Nick Tang and his girl were all in from out of town places, but I was too sick to party. I haven’t been that miserable in a long time.

Edit: Shopping for lenses is going to be a bitch. I need a nice macro lens. Too bad the one that takes the photos I want is $400. Nerg. I may be able to get away with the Sigma Macro/Telephoto lens for $200, but it’s still going to be another round of saving up.

So, in order to raise more money for the new camera, I’ve decided to put all of my pixietails up on Ebay. That’s right, every one of them, all 187. They just don’t hold the same joy for me as they used to, so I feel okay selling them now. I have the reserve price set a bit high at $300, but I don’t really think they’re worth less than that. Market price is between $1 and $5 for each of them, and 187 x 2 = $374. The ‘buy it now’ price is $400, but I don’t honestly expect anyone to use it. These things are a niche market collectible, you know? Anyway, you can see the auction on Ebay here. Not that I expect that any of you will actually want to bid anyway, but I’ll be totally checking it complusively for 7 days.

Note: Two of my costumes are up as well.
Princess Daisy: here.
Princess Toadstool/Peach: here.

EDIT 10/10/05: Well, shit on me, the pixietails have already passed my reserve. They’ll sell for at least $300 so far.

I have been talking to the President of the Georgia Hummer Study Group (Rusty Trump) about a re-design and such for his webpage. I had a fun idea, so I threw a quick Wordpress install up as a test, added a nice theme and fixed the header image.. etc. So far, it’s looking pretty nice. I can find pretty much any plugin I like for it, so I went looking for a wysiwyg editor, because I know he doesn’t have all the time in the world to learn HTML. I tried Wysi-Wordpress first, but it has a bad habit of not closing image tags if you add the image first. The align=right function didn’t work stunningly well either, so I went looking for another. I fell in love with FCKeditor, but it’s not really an easy install. Then, I stumbled upon Chenpress. It’s Wordpress plugin that uses FCKeditor! Love of loves… It’s even drag and drop. I installed it not really expecting much, but it sure surprised the hell out of me. It’s stunning. You can open up two web pages (ex: the gallery and the post) and drag an image from one to the post you’re making. Right clicking on the image gives to an edit menu, where you can tell the image you’re now linking to be either left, right, or center aligned, and more! The thing works just like a Word document. It’s so easy to use, I had to install it here, even though I don’t really need to use a wysiwyg editor.

On an even cooler note, I got an e-mail on September the 26th from Mr. Trump’s wife, Cheryl about the photos I took at the Georgia Hummingbird Festival. She wanted to use them in the quarterly newsletter for all of Georgia! She said she’s give me photo-credit and list my web page so people could see them in color. Then she asked me to be the official photographer for the festival next year! I don’t know exactly what that involves on their part, but I figured I’d be there anyway.. I might even get in for free and get a cool tee-shirt or something.

Note: This whole post was made with the Chenpress editior. Love!

I LOVE TIME SQUAD! Seriously. Taken from here: Time Squad, Cartoon Network’s tenth original Cartoon Cartoon first aired on June 8, 2001. Created by Dave Wesson, the series is a true homage to Jay Ward’s Peabody and Sherman. Time Squad explores the humorous, yet unknown events in our world’s history.
The story involves an orphan, Otto Osworth, who happens to meet two time travelers from 100 million years in the future. Time Squad officer Buck Tudorussel, an overly excited, trigger-happy time cop, and his partner, the Larry 3000, a communication robot. The two end up taking Otto under their wing because of his extensive knowledge of world history. In an effort to enforce the past to protect the future, the trio travel back in time to pivotal points in history to correct it. With Otto’s knowledge of the past, Larry’s technical know-how, and Officer Tudressel’s brute force, the squad travels from era to era convincing historical figures to stick to their original in plans to maintain the time-space continuum.
This has to be one of my most loved TV shows ever. I check every 3 months or so to see if anyone knows any more about it or if it’s being shown again. I found out today that it’s back on Cartoon Network Saturdays at 5am. I soooo need. I always check to see if there will ever be a DVD release. I mean, it’s only 26 episodes, but nothing so far. I have a few episodes on blank tapes here, but none in any order, and they’re all really really hard to find. I even check P2P sharing, but still no Time Squad at my fingertips. There aren’t even any t-shirts. Somebody tell me that you have all 26 episodes on tape for me… Yes? Yes? Maybe?

So, crickie.com is officially back up. It’s far from being done, but it’s working mostly now. I have to add in each of my previous 354 posts by hand (cut and paste helps a bit, but.. meh) to get the archives working, but much of the hard stuff has already ben taken care of. The photo gallery is back up and linked properly over on the right. The ** means that particular album is new or has been recently updated. The ‘I read’ section is back, and autolinks are also working. I’m working on getting a FAQ up, getting an ‘about me’ page up, getting all of my OpenCanvas movies up, and getting a CafePress section back up. I have trouble remembering what was on the page without actually looking at it, so if you remember a particular section of bit I’ve not gotten, let me know. I have to talk to Blixem about getting the LJ feed running again.

Crickie.com died about two days ago. Either a server upgrade killed my archaic version of PostNuke, or something else untoward happened. I went to bed and it was working, I got up and it was dead.
Anyway, as you can see, I’m working on it. It’ll take quite a while, and you’ll see a ton of back posts popping up and I get the archives back. I’ve also upgraded form Gallery to Gallery2, so the pictures will be back, but later as well.
Bear with me.