Visited a new forest preserve today – Pratt’s Wayne Woods. I got more photos of dragonflies today that I’ve gotten in many years combined but I had to post this frog photo because he’s so cute. You can check out all the photos I took today, including my favorite dragonfly, at Flickr.
I bought a 4GB Lexar CF card this week which allows me to take approximately 250 photos if I choose RAW+JPEG at the highest quality (I was right, sRAW is only 2.5 MP which is crap; why even bother? I think it should have been at least 5 MB since the full size is 10 MB).
After comparing the quality between the two types last night, I’ve decided to stick with RAW exclusively since the JPEGs are complete crap in comparison. Plus I can get more photos on a card. I can easily convert a batch of RAW photos to JPEG for posting reasons, plus retain the EXIF info for Flickr. How sweet is that?
Along with my 2 GB card I can now take somewhere around 450 photos before I run out of space. Much better than 150 photos with just the 2 GB card. I was deleting photos in the field (when we were shooting the hot air balloons) just to make room for more and that sucks since you can’t really gleam which ones are good until you’re in front of a computer. I tried transferring the photos to my old Image Tank but I don’t trust it. It was plugged into the cigarette lighter and transferring when it abruptly shut off. I don’t think I’m going to be using it for much more than a paperweight now that I’m leery of it’s reliability.
I also bought a 500 GB Western Digital external hard drive to back up all my photos. It’s so quick that I backed up 10 GB in less than twenty minutes. I may or may not back up my MP3s to it as well. I have most of those burned to DVDs, though. I’ve been a little lazier with the photos. I still need to determine what I was able to recover from the hard drive failure. If you recall, I just starting burning data to DVD as quickly as possible before it disappeared.
Right now we have 6 internal hard drives laying around with god knows what on them. Not even sure which of those drives are not corrupted. One of these days I need to make it a project to check the data on each one, backup what is needed, then destroy them. Want to wager a guess when I’ll get around to that daunting task?
Cleaning the house is such a pain in the ass. I don’t even clean as often as I should because it’s so damn annoying.
I’m particularly annoyed with mops. I cannot find a good one to save my life. I like the Mr. Clean mop, but it seems you need a fresh mop head after every use. At $5.99 a refill, that’s some expensive mopping even if you only do it once a week like I do. It would probably be cheaper to pay a maid. Does anyone have a mop suggestion? Maybe I should do the Swiffer? I have the dry cloths for the laminate in the dining room, but they have wet ones I could try on the tile in the kitchen. Suggestions? Comments? Concerns?
One thing I have learned is that scented fabric softener sucks. I spent 15 minutes cleaning up the residue from my washing machine where you put the softener. There was all this green goo in the dispenser. I can only imagine what it leaves behind on the clothes. This doesn’t happen with the kind that has no dyes and perfumes, plus my clothes end up smelling fresher because they’re left with the detergent smell. Whereas when I use both scented products it’s like they cancel each other out. So let that be a lesson to us all.
The Brothers Solomon – Mildly entertaining but at the bottom of the barrel compared to the other movies I’ve seen this year. I should have known – it’s not as if Will Forte or Will Arnett are actually good at what they do. You need only to watch SNL to see that, as well as miss the genius that was Will Ferrell and Jimmy Fallon. Only watch this movie if you’re really bored and have absolutely no other options.
Strange Wildnerness – This has got to be one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long time; I’m surprised it didn’t go straight to video, it’s just that bad. Adam Sandler should be ashamed to have produced this! I wasn’t expecting a fantastic movie, but something stupid, yet funny, like Malibu’s Most Wanted. Instead it was just stupid. They even cut a scene from the previews that was actually amusing and more than once during the film there was a perfect opening for something funny to happen and it didn’t. I could have come up with better gags than these people. And the acting was just awful. I was really surprised considering some of these guys have been in other movies and given a much better performance. Plus the way the scenes were cut was just awful; they didn’t flow together well at all. Don’t waste your time; you’re better off watching The Brothers Solomon which would have been my pick for worst movie of the year had I not seen this one. And to think I actually wanted to see this and paid to rent it because my free movie coupon had expired!
WALL-E – By far the best movie I saw this weekend; not that there was any competition! I definitely wouldn’t call it the best Pixar film to date – I still prefer Monsters Inc. and The Incredibles, but leave it to Pixar to make a film that lacks dialog for the first 10-15 minutes interesting. I couldn’t help but think that the human race could end up the way they do in the film if we’re not careful.
Photos from the 5:30 am hot air balloon launch this morning have been posted at Flickr.
I’m so happy I managed to drag my butt out of bed at 4 am for this because it was so worth it. We got a great spot and saw almost all of the balloons that launched with the exception of a penguin design. The weather was a bit nippy at that hour but the sky was clear and our photos came out great. I was rather worried while I was taking them because it’s hard to tell on the LCD what the photo is really going to look like. I’m happy to report that the photo almost always looks better on the computer than it appears on the camera.
After the balloons had left us, we took off and had breakfast, then killed a little time shopping before scoping out a place to sit for the parade Joe’s son was in. Those photos are to follow later this weekend.