For Tahoe I rented the Canon 70-200 f4L IS. I previously rented the f2.8, but it was really really heavy, so I thought I'd see how I liked the lighter version. It's a great lens for portraits outdoors or in good light, and it is much lighter. Of all the lenses I've rented so far, this is the one I'm closest to buying. But I really can't justify it yet. Ah, the perpetual struggle.

I also got to take a bunch of shot's on Ethan's new camera with his Sigma 30mm f1.4. Not only that, I got to take pictures of the illustrious Mr. Danny! It was really good to see him again, as it had been way way too long. All the photos from that night were taken at ISO 1600 in low light. They are certainly somewhat noisy, but I still maintain that shooting at 1600 is better than getting blurry photos. I think Ethan's sensor might also be slightly lower noise than mine. I've also been toying with the idea of getting a new body, but that I really can't justify.

Continuing a theme of "Ethan's fault," I'm also trying a new challenge: one photo a week. I'd previously tried to do 100 days of photos, but failed at that. One per week sounds much more achievable. Still, I've not been doing a good job. I did a couple today to try to cover for the last few weeks, but really two every two weeks is not the same.

I'm also thinking I should install some new gallery software that other people can upload to. I'm not ready to replace bins for my main gallery, but I'd like to experiment a bit. I might make my one a week challenge photos use something else. And maybe then I'd throw up more random pictures for the blog. We'll see. I still need to upgrade my mailserver, and I've been putting that off for a long time too, so who knows if I'll get to new gallery software any time soon.

Next week I'll be on vacation in Colorado. I'm excited to go for some landscapes again.

Jen and I spent the Christmas holiday in Deptford, New Jersey with her family. While her mother is still a little Christmas crazy (and passed it on to Jen), she has definitely calmed down from a couple years ago. However, she still made so many Christmas cookies and chocolate dipped things. I think I probably gained several pounds over the week I spent there. All in all, it was a fine Christmas.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the trip was that I gathered yet more evidence that I am allergic to latex rubber products (but fortunately, not LaTeX). Over the last several months, my skin has been really acting up. After months and many many visits to a dermatologist, I think I'm just about ready to conclude that contact dermatitis from latex is to blame. I had a patch test where they put a blotter of 24 different common allergens on my back for 3 days, which showed I was allergic to thimerisol and carba mix, which includes chemicals in many rubber products. While in New Jersey, I applied a latex bandaid to my finger for a minor cut, and within 24 hours I had a very noticeable allergic reaction right underneath the bandaid. Fairly conclusive, I think. I also noticed that several of the itchy areas correspond to elastic bands in my clothing, so I ordered some latex-free underwear online. We'll see if it helps any.

From New Jersey, we drove to Cape Cod for a fantastic New Year's party in a giant mansion. I had some time to play around with the 17-55 2.8 IS lens I have rented right now. It is definitely a very good general purpose lens for 1.6x cameras, although I do wish it got a bit longer. That said I'm not sure I'd want to buy one just yet. I'm not sure it gives me enough advantage over my current 10-22 and 28-135. Also, I hear a replacement for the 5D is coming out soon, so I'm probably going to hold of buying a new lens until I decide I can't afford a new body.

The party on the Cape also featured Rock Band. Jen liked it so much that we bought it. Since buying it on Wednesday, people have already come over to rock out twice, and more scheduled for Sunday. I'm really not very good at it. I've never had much musical aptitude, and although Rock Band doesn't map perfectly to real musical skill, I'm still bad at it.

After the Cape we drove on to Boston for work and a wedding. The wedding was at St James's Episcopal Church on Mass Ave. The lighting in the church was so amazingly horrible for photography, and I failed to get an aisle seat, so I don't really have an pictures from the ceremony. The reception was much better lit, and had a nice low ceiling for bounce flash, so I did at least get a few good photos.

And now I'm finally back home. While we were gone we put our cat in a Feline Bed and Breakfast. When I went to pick him up, he seemed pretty happy, and he recovered from the experience remarkably quickly. If you absolutely have to board your cat in the Bay Area, I recommend them highly.

As I mentioned earlier, I rented a Canon 70-200 2.8 IS L lens from lensrentals.com for the shoot. On my 1.6x crop camera, the lens was just a bit too long for a lot of the shots, but when it worked, it worked beautifully.

I really liked renting a lens for the shoot. It let me try a lens I otherwise couldn't afford, and as a result I feel I learned a fair bit more from the shoot than I could have otherwise -- not to mention I think the pictures came out well. I've ordered a Canon 17-55 f2.8 IS EF-S for a month, during which I'll be shooting Christmas at Jen's parent's house and another wedding. I'll report back.

Much of my free time in the last few months has been devoted to being sick. I've been to the doctor's office more times than I can count, and they are still not sure what the fuck is wrong with me. I'm due for a "patch test" in which they stick a bunch of allergens on my back and don't let me shower for four days. However, I'm told not to have too high hopes for this test.

I've also spent a lot of time on "research" into November Games. I've been working on this on and off for several years now, and I finally finished enough to publish a version. I'm still working on it, so expect more improvements in the next few years. You can download the paper at:
http://www.nimlabs.org/~nim/nov/report.pdf

Now that November is over, I'm trying to pick up some of my other hobbies that have fallen by the wayside. I'm refreshing my sourdough starter which miraculously isn't dead yet, despite months of neglect in the fridge. Yeasts are hardy critters. I'll probably just bake a few loaves before putting it back in storage, just to remind myself that I can.

Another hobby to pick up is ham radio. I'm pretty sure what I need is an auto-tuner. Although the Buddipole can be hand tuned, I'm not very good at it and the VSWR meter on the FT-817 is pretty shitty. I suspect I'll buy the LDG Z-100 or maybe the Z-11 Pro.

And finally, photography. Since my last post, I've been to a wedding in Boston and gone ballooning in Sonoma. I'll be shooting another wedding (they are dropping like flies!!) in a week, this time as the official photographer! I'm not actually a wedding photographer, I'm just doing this as a favor for a couple of good friends. It does mean I need to clean my sensor (you can see a couple persistent specks in the ballooning photos), and I think I may rent a lens, the Canon 70-200 F2.8 L IS, which is very popular with wedding photographers.

Yet another big time sink has been our TV system. I recently purchased a new 32" LCD HDTV and got rid of our old and hugely shitty 21" CRT. And of course, being the geek I am, I decided now that I had an HD display, I needed to make our MythTV machine record broadcast HD programming. So I bought a pcHDTV 5500 card and stuck it in the machine. Of course, with the new HD workload, the machine wasn't quite performing up to my demaning specifications, so I upgraded the CPU and disks, and spent many hours rebuilding kernels, reconfiguring X, and generally improving performance. Although the machine is now an unmaintainable mess, it seems to perform acceptably. Victory, or something.

Well, thats all for now. Hopefully future posts will be a little more frequent.

I did successfully build two battery packs to power the Yaesu FT-817 I bought. I also spent a bunch of money on supplies to build an electrically shortened half-wave dipole out of PVC pipe and wire. However, by the time I was done I'd spent a significant fraction of the cost of the Buddipole I purchased when I realized how just much my hand-built antenna sucked in comparison.

Both the radio and the Buddipole are awesome. Do you know that feeling you get when you handle a well made instrument of some sort? The feeling of quality? Yeah, these have that.

But quality alone does not make something useful. I took both up to Tilden park to compete in the IARU HF competition.. And I failed. Miserably. I made only four qualifying contacts. I also got a large pile of incredibly itchy insect bites, which frankly are more annoying than failing miserably at a ham radio contest.

Also, I'm vain. My new call-sign is N1MMY.

The first obstacle I threw in my path was the Extra class licence exam. I studied for a long time (longer than I've studied for any other test in my life. Really.) and passed just fine. Yet I still couldn't justify the expense to myself.

For a long time, I've had this crazy scheme to build a kick ass battery / solar power system for my (still hypothetical) radio, ala KA7OEI. Well, I've developed a concrete plan of action that keeps monetary outlay reasonable throughout the project, allowing me to cut my losses and forget about it at any stage. And if I do make it to the end of the plan, I'll be proud of what I made so I can move on without bemoaning the waste of money.

Step 0 [complete]:

Pass Extra class exam. Done. 'Nuff said.

Step 1 [complete]:

Purchase DeWalt 36V battery pack from Ebay and a 'Dapter. Both have arrived and I am now ready for:

Step 2:

Go to Fry's to purchase other equipment needed to build a simple 4 cell A123/M1 pack. Build said pack.

Step 3:

Finally give in and buy a Yaesu FT-817ND. I'll probably also get a Yo-Yo-Vee. I'll not buy a Buddipole at least until I've given the YoYo solution a serious shot. Given that I'm more interested in NVIS than DX, I think the YoYo has a decent chance of being sufficient.

Step 4:

Build kick-ass power system. Details shaky. It should power a radio and an HF amp (probably the HL-50B). And maybe involve a solar charger.

Step 5:

Buy HF amp. Build cool carrying system to hold all components. Earn ham geek cred. Stuff.

That's the plan. We'll see how far I get...

The trip itself was excellent. We spent two nights (Friday and Saturday) at the Middle Paradise Valley camp site. The site was quite posh, having a pit toilet and a bear box. A pit toilet may not sound wonderful, but it beats the crap out of digging your own hole each time (no pun intended).

We even managed to get most of the bad luck out of the way in the packing and on the journey there. Due to a small snafu with failing to stop at the last gas station and having to backtrack, we arrived at the staging campground (Sentinal, in Ceder Grove) at 2am Thursday night! But we made up for it by sleeping in on Saturday morning.

The trip had a lot of wildlife. The most exciting wildlife were the completely fearless deer that ran rampant around the campsite. According to the ranger, they were after the salt in our urine. Yum!

I'm really glad I brought my EF-S 10-22. It got a lot of use. I'd considered buying the EF 100-400L for this trip, but decided it was way too expensive and too heavy. Buy ironically, we ran into a crazy old dude who had also schlepped a Canon 20D up a mountain and did have a 100-400L. He let me play it with it. Such a nice lens. I'm so tempted.

I took a lot of panoramas this trip, and my old workflow just wasn't up to it. This time, I assembled and layed-out the panoramas in Autopano Pro, then exported them to Hugin and Enblend for the final warping and blending. This worked fairly well and I'm quite happy with the results.

Also, REI did have an almost exact replacement for my fleece jacket. The only problem with the new one is lack of pit zippers.

First off, the Kitty destroyed my thermarest. It now has a large number of small claw shaped slits in it, and thus does a very poor job of being airtight. For some reason, cat attacks don't seem to be covered by the thermarest lifetime warranty, either. I could get a Z-rest to replace it since that would not have this problem (this is already the second thermarest I've had to replace due to leaking), but for some reason I really prefer the extra padding of inflatable pads.

I was already pretty pissed off by having to replace my sleeping pad, when to make matters worse, my beloved fleece jacket died in the dryer. The main zipper exploded; now it doesn't have a handle and it only goes up unless you use a small pointy object to depress a little lever which unlocks the ratchet mechanism. This is probably reparable, but the jacket is already in pretty sorry shape. I've had it for at least 8 years, maybe closer to 10, and it has accompanied me on a wide range of adventures. I loved that fleece dearly, but it is time to let go. I'll probably buy a new one at REI or something, although I just know they won't have an exact replacement.

In related news, I bought a new camera bag for this trip: the Lowepro Nova 3. Its main feature is that it has belt loops that fit on the hip strap of my pack, so I can carry it on my waist. Hopefully this will be better than attaching a bag to the side of my pack like I did last time.

The major difference was that I used baking powder in the batter. Perhaps this is cheating, but at this point, I'm willing to make some sacrifices. The injera still wasn't great, but it was at least edible.

As to the other details, I used 50/50 ivory teff and AP wheat flour, 175% hydration, and I gelated 16oz of the batter with 24oz hot water. The baking powder was mixed in just prior to cooking, although I think next time I'll try self rising flour instead of AP.

The main distinctive factor was that I went out and got a bunch of fresh basil and oregano, steeped them in warm oil, and then used them to top the focaccia. It came out pretty well, although perhaps slightly undercooked.

I've also started a sourdough rye. More on that later.