Thursday right?

My eyes are bleeding!!! I have stared at a computer screen far too much today and went round and round and round with multiple items. THe funny part of today was a little picture. Ill post that later.

We had a news item producer/director from London, a camera guy who is English but lives in San Fran, and a sound guy from the local area in to the office to work on our great grasshopper debacle last year. They are in the area doing multiple stories before heading off to other climes. The sound guy and I were yacking about ballooning and other things while he was waiting to do the videos. No prob there. Off I went to do other things... Then the young lady from London popped in to see if we were flying this weekend and I said yup.. Sunday.. ( Stupid me.. Its Saturday ) and I offered her a spot in the basket if we did. I had to send her a note saying Saturday instead of Sunday and see if they still had space in their tight schedule. We shall see.. but I have to run and get propane tomorrow just in case. Oh... and Ice. Nice woman.. Serious South London accent. If anything we may just fly Sunday. I have no clue. I am so very impressed with my inability to read....

I was looking for something else and found something else that is something else. Just touching on some of the colors in the local area. Varied and direct. Nothing subtle in this even with the flowers. Well.. perhaps they could have been subtle if I let them.. but I did... hah.... cause I don't have to!

Direct Light.

Deep Lilacs

Inventoried.

Good selection of varied things. Everywhere a cool. thing.

My facebook banner for the day and logo... nice play on the day of cold.

We were try to get the cameras up and right and I played a joke on the guys... It took seconds for some to find it and others hours....

So funny!

Suffusion of Blue.

The one thing that Albuquerque has that I always will treasure is the blue skies. Unless there is a major dust storm or crazy weather there are always blue skies. They might be light soft blue or dark and deep blue. Stark steel blues and soft willowy blues with fluffy clouds and big thunderheads.

I can sit there on the West side and look at the Sandias until the the drops behind me. If I had time for that. I really have to make the time for that. Really! Taking pictures of the clouds that brew up over us almost every day can be a little boring. I am saying that they are ever changing but constant pictures of the clouds can be monotonous. I did thing editing some of the petroglyphs for the colors of the basalt and a nip of sky might be nice as back drops. I posted them below.

Working today was a bit of a speed waiting line. Solving a few problems only to be halted at the last moment sucked. Hoping tomorrow we can get that cleared up. I did go and edit out another excel file and that makes me happy. Cable due in tomorrow to finish up the the camera setup. The guys are all having a good time working with them, adjusting, monitoring, its a hoot. Tomorrow we are going to look at the video take from one cam to see if the sunlight is hindering what we see or its the best we can get. The auto setting is pretty cool but loves the external light. I have to wait till the 28th to get the sirius 50 ft extension cable so I can run that and get that working. I am sewing with spaghetti.

Here are the shots I selected for today....

Petro-Dancin Man.

Petro-Pokey Man

Petro-Whistling Man

Fun with Petro's

Yeah... I have to get out there at dawn and then at dusk and see what else shows up when the sunlight is in a different part of the sky. I have missed a bunch but they are hard to photograph without signs, people, posts in the way. I could take some optically shifted shots and then blend them....naaaa.. that would be complete manipulation of the shot and then I might as well completely fake it. I will see what I can do..... soon.... soonish.....

My facebook banner for the day was a select shot when the sky goes orange red. Nicely framed by the trees in my backyard. And my logo is another shot of the sun set over the West side from the East side. Subtle and different. Albuquerque has so many things making it worthy to come and sit a spell.

I could load a massive amount of shots here but its nice to stick with just a few.

And this was terribly funny....

Rodents of unusual sneakyness

No, not skulking around the office....hahaha.. I am not a rodent! Loads of misc stuff at work. Many phone calls and many weird and strange things. It was a bit odd. One misfiring email from yesterday corrected, one email and call verified, one item ordered and pending.

Very large! Very! I ordered 1000 feet of cat 6 external, direct bury cable for our weather surveillance video cameras. I am hoping.. I expect it will work fine but I am hoping to have a 360 degrees of video monitoring of the weather movement around the office. The techs are going to mount them on our tower behind the office at the highest point possible while wearing their safety equipment.. so that will be about 6 or so feet below the last tie off point. Quite nicely clearing the surrounding area.

I hope it works... they are 1080p cameras and the take so far is impressive. After that we want to set up a unit at our radar site to monitor the dish, monitor the status display, the surrounding area and also hook up on the tower itself which has a wonderful view in every direction and right into town. We do need a netlink from there but we might be able to do that too.

That is just part of our situational awareness system. A very active part of it. When we are able to capture an hour of weather drawing in and then using the software in the office to speed it up then post it to our office website the show the progression of storms or active weather patterns... well... Its totally COOL and I am just a tech weenie.

When I made it home I was replacing door locks and running in circles. More secure is very secure. I have cameras on the house but danged if I want to buy this unit for myself.. 8 cams and a 1tb hdd. Cool stuff. So... yeah.. busy at the house.... then I was looking out the window and what do I see but that sneaky squirrel! Just lounging around my pond...snacking on the seed pods from my psycho neighbor's tree... yeah.. psycho..the tree is too... If you wander around my back yard they are gonna ask if your a trespasser.... No.. its my backyard! They may even ask you if you have a water leak going on... no.. really.. its my ponds waterfall... yes you can see it from their yard. If you poke your head over the fence. Thanks though for checking with me about it..... you just never know. They are nice enough.

Well, off track again.... squirrel! Yes.. just right there.. got the cam out and shot a few through the glass door... Wish I could ahve gotten closer but its very... well.....squirrelly!

 Its All Mine!

 Big cheeks

Tiny Nose.

 Checking for predators.

Bushes Are Good!

Just eating seeds in tiny hands.

Squirrel In Repose.

Paint me like a french lady.

And then off to the pond water fountain to drink..peek over the top rock then mess around in the pine needles under the tree. Such a wonderful resort to hang out at. No cover charge at all.

I dithered around with facebook banner pictures and did spend some time editing a picture just to toss it away as boooorrrriiinnnngggg! SO I dug around and found this excellent shot I took as I was flying with friends in Los Lunas. Father taking daughter out for a ride to see our four balloons wandering around in the gently moving air. They stopped and were waving as we crossed over the road. It was a fun day. It took forever to land that day as we were almost becalmed over a school track field. It had fences around it making it pretty hard to get out of if we did land so we slowly.. very slowly got past it. Fun!

Logo was just before lifting off again after a hop.

Tomorrow is Wednesday and I didn't get a bunch of stuff done I needed to do after work and I have stuff at work I want to get done too... Ah well... I have to remember to leave it at the office even if that is very very hard.

I am going to go surf the nets to relax....

Structured

A daily double. Way late tonight due to a list of things. Then my computer locked and that was that. Good that it waited until almost 5pm to do so. Confusion over a sim card that didn't exist or a sim card in something else but labeled something else.. Its very confusing. That one I am hoping to get straightened out tomorrow morning. Very confusing. Lots of calls to make tomorrow. I hope I wrote it all down.

Head shaking back and forth, back and forth! The sound... wabba, wabba, wabba rings as you do so. Time to move my doorway into my office again. Or add a piece so it is more like a maze. Cool thing to day was Tony and Mike setting up our camera system. They went right to it. I think they will be figuring out how many feet of cat6 cable they need to set the external camera set up. Three cameras each facing about 120 degrees from each other so that our operations people can monitor and capture all directions of weather. Should be pretty darn cool.

I worked on some shots of Ft Worth again tonight. Quickly. I have many to go and I want to show the spread of things and items that were available to shoot there... and yeah.. I didn't even get everything I wanted. Hard to take pictures of culvert covers in the middle of very busy roads.

The architecture is awesome.

 Neckbreaking Night.

Offices and apartments. I really like it. 

Day Lights

 Nice alleyways. I am impressed. Almost no graffiti.

Toodles!

Ostentatious! Its too bad I cant get a good straight on shot but you have a roads width between.

Throwback.

 I love the contrast here. I really love the intricacies against the flat glass. It was excellent.

Yep.. More and more.. alleys...lights...buildings...doorways.... trees....stuff!

It was a good time.

My facebook banner for the day... great tweak on the Zebras that are used to launch balloons.

Logo for the day is the back of my trailers bumper stickers tweaked.. fun .. so much fun with Gimp.

Does it look tweaked.. yes.. if you saw the original.

Off I go to save the day.... oh.. sorry.. thats UnderDog! Off I go to edit in the fray!

Go bother yourself...LOL

Technical Day

Truthfully it started out last night with finding a good link to the AWIPS 2 managers guide and a couple of hours enjoying the information in it. What was to my mind a sloppily crafted operating database system overlay is turning out to be not so bad. It is a very complicated system with many weird and dynamic functionality. I wish I had my tab system up but I am on my home surface digging through it all. I am hoping to spend an hour every other day with it until we install in May.

Why every other day. Because I have many other systems to monitor, many other items to support and process and people to keep happy. I enjoy the happy part because them being happy makes me happy. I am hoping on the odd days to look over the build docs and get familiar with what they want us to do. Come the end of April I hope I have it relatively in my head. Another Einstein quote for you.

 “Never memorize something that you can look up.” 
― Albert Einstein

So I will have the system manual in my phone and tablet. 

Thats not all I did with my time. I reviewed a lot about the Nikon D7100. There is a lot out there. Sadly there is a bunch of goofy stuff too. I was mainly looking for cut outs to get to specific settings like ISO, Bracketing, Flash so that I am not fumbling around all the time. Another bunch of stuff to stick in my cell phone. 

Oh... one thing I did think about today was that a neat way of monitoring radio transmitters sites wont work for our office in most cases and where it would would cost us more in connection fees that is really needed. Its free to jsut call someone in the area to see if a transmission is going out instead of paying for a carrier. Now..... saying that does not mean that in the near future it won't be feasible. I am going to make some calls when I have the time to see if I can get it done with little time out of my day.... I have lots going on in the next 30 to 45 days and then I want to take some classes to refresh myself o n networking, linux, and one on Excel for the fun and need of it. Yes.. Excel is fun.

I did go over the shots from Ft Worth again and picked a few more out to work with. I was halfway with one when my wife decided it look very cool and was like was that what I was going for... LOL.. I have to remember that what I think is cool is not what others think is cool as I sold two pictures I thought were very boring. Below is the shot half way and then how I wanted it ( I really liked it ) and then two more.. I will comment below each shot.

Inset.

The original shot with a wide clip inset and the tone changed.

The NORRIS.

 Spanned and adjusted to bring out the reflection on the brick face of the Norris. An old theater repurposed as a convention center front. I love it.

 POOL.

 Its all about the neon. It glows on its own. Capturing it and making it what I want it to be is a completely different thing.

Timing.

My total favorite of the day. I cannot believe how enjoyable it was when this floated out of the edit. 

All three are going to be used as wallpaper and I hope I can print the first and third as large as the should be. 60 inches by 20 inches. The last should be on metal as it is so very industrial. 

Today was a very constructive day on the work and hobby side. On the home repair side not so much. No saws all and could not find the need to drive all the way down to the store for a door knob. I will hopefully pick both up tomorrow after I help my brother pick up a elliptical trainer after work.

My facebook banner for the day came out better than I thought too. Much fun in selecting and editing. The logo was another fun sign. You can see how I stole the upper banner.

Pointedly.

 Look closer at the shot. Go ahead and tell me why its strange..other than the color.

Exit 224A.

Be there or be run over.

I am trying not go into work earlier than I usually do. So many things to do and I know other things are going to get in the way of my long list. I have hopes. I hope you hope too.

Sublime Standing Waves

Saturdays should be about relaxing.. maybe getting something done or off fishing. Nope. Sorry nothing done at all worth reporting. Its gonna be a short blog today. Maybe a bit more on my trip to Ft. Worth might be interesting.

Day two, three were a conglomeration of new equipment coming, off the shelf stuff we could use to do other monitoring and some updates to standing systems. Its a lot of stuff to sit back and think about and hopefully HQ will send out updates with good info on installing or modifying this stuff.

Note to self and others that feel they are better than some....  Einstein himself said that if you cant explain something to someone then you are not doing a good enough job.... paraphrasing.

The correct quote is... “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” 
― Albert Einstein
Off course for the day a bit. So. most everyone was fantastic. There is a dynamic up there that I would love to work with closer. What I do know is that I have my "house" to get in order. House being my duties. I have for the last three/four years been more JOAT or Jack Of All Trades for the office and neglecting my main duties to see to the full function of the office. Now its time for me to move my footmark off the office operations and back onto my operations. I am looking forward to our new operating systems and the console access that comes with it. I think with it sitting next to me I can sit and work with it everyday I will become more confident and gain full understanding of how its processes run around with each other. I have not had time to sit and do this. There is too much for me to do at once.

Okay. Enough of that... Today I have a good time editing a few shots from my trip for starkness. It didn't start that way but thats how it worked. Deep and few tones. Stark and bold. Just working about as I feel. Not having a direction is sometimes relieving. Soon I will have to get back to fishing again.

Leaves.

Diner.

Lounge.

I think I should have done some softening and blending but hay.. I didnt want to burn too much time working on them now. The idea is there to chase when I have the time to do it up right. Seems I really like those deep deep blues and dusky purples. Oh and red, red, red.

My facebook banner today may have gotten away from me. I kept layering and modding and processing.... but its okay enough to use.

Cranked the heck out of it like a crazy man. I wonder.. if you get committed can you still have a computer?

ALB INTE fb logo.

Go figure.

I am off for some ice cream with chocolate sprinkles.. if I want.. lots of chocolate sprinkles. Tomorrow I may go get a new doorknob for a closet! I may... if I can contain my excitement get a new sawsall as my second one has gone missing again.... again. Such fun and thrills... LOL. Well in a way it is if I can get out of bed and getting out of bed feel well enough to put clothes on.. I could just slime my way to a chair and veg all day.. you just never know.. Nice to have choices.

Hope you enjoy your choices too.

Return Again.

Alright. Friday and I am home. Had to be in Ft. Worth for the week. It was very educational and illuminating. I met people I have talked to for years but have never met face to face. Excellent people every one. I wish it had been longer and I really wish I could have stayed over the weekend..  No this weekend but a weekend.. reasons for that were many fold.... told below.

No. not the bar... THere was a gymnastics tourney starting and the place was starting to overflow it people for that as we were trying to skip town.

I didn't get to take as many pictures as I hoped but most of the days we didn't get out until after 5pm and it was overcast 3.5 of 5 days. I did get a lot of shots I will work on and there was the one and a half good days. Much to show you.

Amazing place is this part of Ft Worth. Its massive period buildings and the cleanliness and friendliness.. oh and the free drinks at the Embassy Hotel. Yes.. Very nice. Not that I had but one or two small drinks but it was very nice. I too easily go to sleep after one that I never do more.  There was even a starbucks half way between the hotel and the convention / meeting center. Three blocks total. Nice walk. Sad that my stupid sciatic kept acting up.

First day was a half day. The flight out of Albuquerque was delayed for two hours due to weather in Dallas and also the people on the plane decided to get off and hand to be rounded up.. which made a less than hour wait turn into the two. DFW airport is insane. Transport to the hotel was round about but got there. I missed very little as I had tried to get the earliest flight out. Hotel was cool as it had one of those round poofy couches in the middle of the foyeur and smelled nice, fresh flowers, clean shiny floors and again, period sconces, lights, chairs, it was like going back to the 1930s / 50s.

Classy, classy, classy.

There was even a pool on the 5th floor! Yes 5th floor!! I didn't get in. Never had time. Voom there.. Voom here....

Here are a few of the shots of the massive amount of shots...

The Courtyard Hotel.

 Nifty huh!. I was on the 11th floor, this side middle. Great view but the windows were not clean so shots from it were iffy.

Blind Scat.

 Down a blind alley was this cool neon sign. From one of the guys who was at the workshop with me it was very smooth. I didn't get a chance to go but maybe next time. The doorway was an elevator going up. Totally cool!

Uplights.

So much excellent architectural designs and so little time. Loved the uplights on this. I took a few and this isnt as in focus but I loved the framing. I will work on the others to get them better later.

I am tired after all the talking and information overload and the travel. I am going to sit in my zombie chair and vegimatate for a while. Maybe look at some of the other shots. I do have to send off the shot of our group I took this yesterday. Each and ever person there had an amazing history and while we sat there visiting during and after the day was over there was far too much to absorb. I am a crazy person for knowing people and their life. More so certain people.. but some are so interesting I really start bugging them. These guys love telling stories so it was great to sit back and relax and listen to them tell you what they are all about. Most have military in their backgrounds.. not all.. but most... and a lot have masters degrees or are damn smart... I feel like the new kid on the block and I really am.. I am just starting out where they have been around for years. Lots to learn still.

My facebook banner and logo for the day.

 One of our nice highway signs with the added 168 day. It was fun editing the 168 in there from nowhere.

Compass rose as my logo... A pretty nice one.

Okay.. off to rest my fingers... Enjoy your Friday evening.