My oldest sister Cindy gave me a nice birthday present this year. It’s a glass bowl made locally to her in northern California, entirely from recycled glass.
Pretty, isn’t it? It’s weighty and would serve excellently as a bludgeon during the zombie apocalypse. However, I knew instantly what it was for as soon as I opened the box.
I love me some spice drops.
September 16, 2010
Hyatt Regency Atlanta
265 Peachtree Street NE,
Atlanta, Georgia, USA 30303
To whom it may concern:
Greetings! I am writing today for two reasons. First and most importantly to thank you for being a wonderful host institution for Dragon*Con. Those of us who are perennial attendees at this signature event appreciate the effort you undertake to make us feel welcome. I realize it must be trying to have a hotel packed with Wookies, Klingons, Slave Leias (well, maybe not the Leias), and all the shenanigans surrounding Dragon*Con, so thank you for being a wonderful host.
This year was my first staying in your property. I enjoyed the experience, except for the four or five times I had to climb to the eleventh floor (which is a known issue with the Dragon*Con weekend). The rooms I stayed in was pleasant with plenty of space and I appreciated the city views outside on the balcony. If I had one criticism of the room it was the lack of counter space in the bathroom, but that’s something we managed to deal with.
Also, I found the hotel staff to be courteous, professional and prompt once I got their attention. This brings me to crux of the matter that I’m writing about.
On Monday when I was checking out, I decided to use the Bell Hop service to transport my numerous bags to the car I had parked in your facility. I called up the bell service desk at 11:10 or so and was informed I had a 45 minute wait. I could deal with that so I sat back and watched Dragon*Con TV on the hotel television. At 12:30 I rang the bell service desk to make sure I hadn’t been misplaced or forgotten. At that time I was informed of a 10 minute wait. At 1:15 I called again and demanded an honest, accurate assessment of my wait time before a Bell Hop would arrive. I was again informed 10 minutes and I’m happy to say that a bell hop arrived in nine. Total wait time was approximately two hours and ten minutes.
This is a problem for two reasons: Inaccurate reporting of wait time and time that I could have been spending with the eight people I brought in from out of town to spend money in your hotel and Atlanta generally. I was highly resentful of the wasted time I could have been spending with my friends as opposed to waiting for a Bell Hop. I have two suggested solutions for you
The first solution is the one I’d prefer. If you are honest with your patrons who are farther down the Bell Hop list, we’ll respect you for it and be able to plan our days accordingly. Otherwise our very last experience with your establishment will be a negative one, which will color our perceptions of the visit.
Thank you again for being an excellent host hotel for Dragon*Con. I look forward to patronizing your establishment next year
Bill Ruhsam
Marietta, GA
We often get mail that is addressed to “Mr. & Mrs. William Ruhsam”1. Or just to “Bill and Jenn Ruhsam”. Or better yet, horribly misspelled “Bill & Jenn Rubslumsraaqq”. At the cat clinic we take Psyche to, I’m “Mr. Bowie” which entertains the hell out of me.
Sometimes, though, Jenn and I have this conversation.
1: For clarity, we are “Bill Ruhsam and Jenn Bowie” or reversed. More formally of course we are “William M. Ruhsam Jr. and Dr. Jennifer L. Bowie”. If you feel like being perverse, you can send mail to “Dr. and Mr. Bowie”
click through for lots of notes on the image
I have purchased a new PC. Specifically a laptop so I can be a bit more mobile with my digital life. Some of the travails of this purchase are described in this posting, but I haven’t really talked about how much this laptop has upended my workflow.
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I had a commenter a while back say that he missed my posts about running and triathlon training. Alas, for the last little while there hasn’t been much to post, but here is a general update:
Jennifer and I are registered for the 2010 Marine Corps Marathon in Washington DC. This race is October 31st. Those of you good at math may note that date is about 2 months away.
We’ve been training regularly for this race, doing quite well keeping up with our schedule. Until… [duh duh DUHHHH] I pulled my calf muscle and Jennifer started having some feeling-well issues. Right now, I’m about 4 weeks behind on my training and Jenn maybe two. But all is not lost! Things seem to be better in my calf and this weekend I will be resuming my exercise schedule by participating in the Peachtree City Sprint Triathlon (Tri-PTC) which, if you recall, I had to walk 2 years ago due to another calf injury.
I think I’ve given the leg enough time to rest and heal. Now I need to see if I’ve got enough time left to prepare adequately for the marathon. I’ll know that in a few weeks. Jenn is coming along well; if she can survive this CRUSHING SINK OF DEATH known as submitting her tenure dossier, everything will be fine.
Despite the fact I’m racing a triathlon this weekend, I haven’t been doing any real training for triathlon this summer. I’ve been swimming enough to not drown, but I haven’t been on my bike in weeks. No, I’ve pretty much just been concentrating on running, except for the last 3 weeks where I just Sat On My Butt And Ate Bon-Bons™.1 That will obviously change soon and I’ll be back to doing three-days a week runs at work (please oh please oh please will the humidity drop soon?) and long runs on the weekend.
I also need to work in some basic strength training. I can’t really know but I blame my lack of any strength training this spring or summer for my calf strain. I plan to go (after the marathon) and get an evaluation of my muscular weaknesses from an expert and spend the winter working on those.
So, Triathlon this weekend. Marathon on Halloween. I’m sure there will be some other races in there, also. I’ll keep you posted.
1: SOMBAABB is a trademark of the JBWR community. This is what we do when we’re not doing anything else.
The conversion to Network Storage and automatic data duplication continues. For a while now, Jenn and I have been (manually) backing up our computers to an external hard drive using a movable SATA plug in. Two of these HDDs have been our playground with one being kept in an off-site location for security against fires or water damage. The downsides to that was that it requires us to do it; it’s not an automatic solution. Therefore, the network drive.
My plan: automatic backups over the network to the network drives. These will not be used for storage per se1 but merely as a duplicate receptacle for what’s on our computers. Then I will weekly do a drive image of the network drives, which will be our “backups”2. Anything truly critical will be occasionally burned to DVD which will also be kept off site.
Why are we going through all this effort? Well, we’ve got a lot of data that would be impossible to replace. Jenn is an academic and has been writing papers and gathering information since 1997. I’m an amateur photographer and podcaster so I’ve got a bunch of irreplaceable images and audio files. Plus 18 years of accumulated writing and legacy data. Can’t say I’d miss everything if I lost it, but there have been things I’ve gone looking for (and found), making my life easier. This is also a step toward doing away with the majority of my filing cabinet once I get a reliable scanner for monthly bills and other such paper documents that arrive via snailmail.3
1: I’m toying with the idea of putting our music and videos and whatnot on the network drive so we can access it from all computers and eventually a centralized entertainment system. Haven’t decided to take that plunge yet.
2: It’s not a backup by the strict definitions of “backup” because if the computer hdd gets corrupted, it will write the corrupted file to the backup drive. However, I’m not going to go in for the time and money investment to have continuous running tape backups.
3: “Aha!” I hear you say, “Why don’t you get all your bills electronically delivered?” I’ve tried that. It’s not effective for my workflow. I depend on having a spot that all the bills and receipts and crap accumulate in and no matter how many bills I can get through email, there will always be some I can’t, therefore I’ll just stick with the paper system for now.
I am going to buy a portable computing device. Yes, I know, I just bought an Evo 4G which definitely qualifies, but I have some additional specifications that are required.
Item number one is fairly simple. Pretty much any computer nowadays will fit the bill, it just has to have enough oomph to be able to record without too much latency. I ran a test with my friend David Tyberg’s Asus EEE netbook and it seemed to work well. I also ran it on a Macbook Pro (belonging to yet another member of The Extraordinary Contraptions, The best Steampunk Rock Band in this or any other universe!) and that worked just fine as well.
Before all you insane audiophiles get up in a dander, yes I realize there will be a quality difference between running Qubase on a Macbook vs. Audacity on a netbook, but it generally won’t matter until I start putting in a sound-deadened room with excellent quality compression mics and better pre-amps than the M-audio has.
Item two is actually more of a general statement about Windows-based programs. I cannot survive without MS Office. I need it for my job and have developed an expertise level with it that I would be stupid to abandon. Likewise I have utilities such as Idimager that only run in a Windows environment and I’m not interested in finding their Mac-based replacements (although I just discovered that MS Money, which has all of my financial information since 1993, has been discontinued and I better get a copy of Quicken anyhow).
Item three is the big one. I am not a Mac user. I have limited knowledge of how Macs function. I’ve been a Dos-then-windows user since 1985 when we got our first PC. I know an awful lot about the windows environment and I have a lot of stuff around here that was purchased for windows-based computers. I’m frightened that if I jump to the Mac, I’ll have some serious growing pains with trying to get everything talking to each other (if it will at all).
So, what do you think? Should I pay the extra and go with the smaller form factor, nicer feeling track pad, more reliable environment and sexier-in-general computer, or should I stick with a Windows-based laptop of one sort or another.
In case it hasn’t been explicitly published, Jenn and I are putting our house on the market. Reasons are various but the main one is that we want to live closer in to town. We’re thinking Decatur, Oakbrook, Kirkwood, East Atlanta, Grant Park, something like that. We don’t plan to start looking very hard until we get a contract on our existing house, which brings us to the meat of this posting.
Fun is being had preparing the house for sale. The objective, of course, is to repair any little issues and present the home in an appealing manner. Right now, the guest bathroom is in a [ahem] state of disarray as we are working on pulling off wallpaper and putting a nice new surface on them. This became more challenging than we thought when we began. Probably we’ll end up having a professional resurface the drywall before we paint. Hopefully that will be done in about a week.
This weekend I spent a great deal of time spiccing and spanning the living room and kitchen. I cleaned everything and packed away 5.5 years of accumulated stuff in order to show them off to better advantage. As the week goes by, I will be attacking rooms individually to get things cleaned up. Then I have a few tasks out in the yard before we can say that the house is “ready”.
We have a goal for sale (which i won’t tell you) but we’re not planning on pricing ourselves out of the market in order to make some crazy profit. We want to move, and sooner would be better than later, although I guess you could say there would be…entertainment…if we were moving right around the time that Jenn was finishing up her Tenure dossier.
So, wish us luck. If nothing else, we’ll be keeping the house clean for the foreseeable future.
I’d include pictures but my camera is currently visiting a friend’s place in Decatur, alas
The title says it all. Lots of notes on the image if you click through.
So, there you are: capturing images of a concert that fully embody its spirit and energy. Sure, you know that with the low light and general clutter of an on-stage environment you’re likely to throw out most of your photos but you have high hopes of some excellent moments; times where the performers just shine. Where you can feel their music screaming from the image.
Instead you get home and discover that of 250 images, exactly four aren’t crap. That ratio is a bit lower than I care for.
There are manifold reasons why concert photography is hard: everyone’s moving; light is low and variable as the performers move in and out of spots; foreground and background clutter make framing difficult; your options for location are limited (especially in small venues). These are known problems and you do your best to overcome them and, of course, shoot until your hands hurt and you run out of memory cards or battery (or film, I suppose).
Last night was exceptionally frustrating for me, though. These are friends I’m shooting1 and they could really use some great, spectacular, fantabulous, insert-adjective-here concert shots. Part of my particular problem resides with inexperience and the famous learning curve. For example, I learned a few things last night about trusting my autofocus, even when I’ve got good light and spots for focusing on. Here’s an image that I thought was going to be prime:
With some obvious problems like the water bottle in the foreground which would prevent me using this as a full top-to-bottom performer shot, this was a great setup. Unfortunately I got the image off the camera and found this:
Grrr! Out of focus faces are the bane!
Lower down the image we see the problem.
The autofocus picked Sharon’s hip as it’s point of focus (yes, I know it’s me, but I’m still going to anthropomorphize, here) and the shallow depth of field in this situation rendered a potentially good shot into crap. At least, crap for anything other than a small, low-res image similar to the one here on this blog. I was shooting with a Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens and in this setup my depth of field was about 0.4 feet. Over the distance between Sharon’s hip and her head, that 0.4 feet was not sufficient to keep her face inside the zone of focus. I was shooting from about 5 feet away and don’t forget that while depth of field is usually defined as a planar distance from the lens, it’s really a zone of a sphere. If I were 30 feet away with the same depth of field, the vertical distance between her hip and head would have made little difference; at five feet, it killed the shot.
There was a bit of serendipity, though. Here’s Kevin in the same shot. Too bad he’s cropped out at the edge. It’s fun, though.
Kevin has a wearable drum rig for some of the shows. It’s nice when he’s got it because he comes out from behind his drum set where I can get pictures of him.
There are a lot of other things I’ve learned about concert photography in the last year. Most of it through bad experience. There are a few websites out there that have good tips and hints but mostly it’s just getting out there and trying again2. Which I will. And I’ll probably still get crappy photos but at least I’ll have a higher good/crap ratio.
1: The Extraordinary Contraptions have just released their latest album, Scratch the Aether. Check it out!
2: Having good equipment helps, but only somewhat. I’ve had good success using the Canon Rebel XT (about three generations back from the latest and greatest version) and the Sigma 30 f/1.4. There was a guy at the concert who graciously allowed me to borrow his Canon 70-200 f/2.8L IS lens (FABULOUS LENS!) and with that one in hand and using IS for all it’s worth…I captured some of the worst photography of the evening. Know your own equipment.