Life Through the Lens

Halloween at Doug's

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Another Testament to the Nokia N95's Awesomeness

As Dan says...try to do this on an iPhone.  Since its made for iTards, its not wonder the thing only comes with a 2mp non-autofocus camera carried over from the first generation iPhone.  Whereas my 2 yr old N95 has a 5mp auto-focus camera with Carl Ziess optics.  Of course, its no comparison to my Canon 40D, but its not far off...especially if you import it into Lightroom and tweak it a little.  Sure the dynamic range is limited, the chroma and luminance noise is bad at base ISO, and every picture is oversharpening artifacts, but its still better than most low end point and shoots.  I guess a picture is worth a thousand words...I'll shut my mouth now.

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Starsky and Hutch Lives

I had been wondering why the Woodlands is such a crime free area.  I guess its because the ultimate crime fighters live here now.

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Super Burger!

I haven't posted anything in a while mainly because I've just been sitting on my ass or cleaning the house. Its nice to have some down time after a crazy event like lemons. So here's my tasty lunch for today.

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Yee-Haw! 24 Hours of LeMons Texas is over...and we took 7th.

Not bad for our rookie outing.  In case you have no idea what the 24 Hours of Lemons is all about...where's a quick explanation.  Basically, you find a $500 car prep it with rollcage and other required safety equipment then race it on a track for the better part of 24 hrs (in our case 13 total hours because the track is not lit after dark).  The team with the most laps wins $1500 in nickels.  All safety equipment is exempt from the total cost of the car and anything over $500 was a 1 lap/$10 over penalty.  However, cheating was rampant and bribing the BS judges was expected.  Hence there were a few fully race prepped cars that "just happened to be found in a backyard" with little to no lap penalties...we'll be wiser next year and not stick to the rules.

Team 8NSK8 (Nick Ault, Jeff Dinges, Scott Hanba, and myself) finished 7th overall and took home a trophy for winning the Class: Prayer of Finishing.  Friday was a test day as we tried to figure out the track but got no more than about 5 laps per person due to overheating issues.  It was pretty much a blown head gasket, and we ended up replacing it that night in the dark.  Only 4 hours, a sawzall, and some jack stands and it was back to running shape.  Our first day of racing was wrought with pit/driver change blunders and a lack of a fueling strategy.  We did end that day somewhere around 10th place.  Sunday we came back with a strategy and a fire in our bellies to win.  Needless to say, we had been conserving tires and brakes on the first day...but that was no longer.  We put a fresh set of Pirelli P Zero Neros on the front of the car and battled our way up the ranks.  At one point we were up to 3rd place, then a final driver change and the unfortunately timed decision of the event staff to actually do their job policing the fueling area got us a 10 min penalty for not shutting off the car during fueling and not having everyone handling fuel in a firesuit.  We were having hot start issues and were able to get away with it on the first pit stop driver change.  Of course, the entire weekend, people were in shorts and t-shirts fueling cars...up until this last 2 hrs of the race.  This penalty was exacted on Jeff as they forced him to play the bongos for 10 mins in front of the crowd in the grandstands.  The other unfortunate...and eventually fortunate thing was that a small coolant hose blew while in the penalty area.  They allowed us to fix it, but we were out 35 mins and had lost a good 15-17 laps.  At least it didn't blow on the track or we would have lost even more time.  We clawed our way back up to 7th and that's where we finished.  At least next year we'll already have a proven car and will bring good bribes for the judges so we can cheat our way to victory!  Next year we will have a full data acq system onboard just to see how we do :)

Here's a few of the pics from the weekend.  See the rest of the photos here: Team 8NSK8 and Doug's pics

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This is what happens when you work at an Accident Reconstruction Company

You always find random crap like this laying around. I would definitely call this a multi-scale, multi-vehicle, catastrophic accident.

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Test Shot from the new Canon EF-S 18-200mm F3.5-5.6 Lens

Post a comment of what you think of the image quality :)  Shot at 1/500s F8 @ 200mm, cropped slightly to straighten the horizon.

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Gobs of Memory

Just added two new Sandisk Extreme III 16gb cards to my collection.  Now I have three Sandisk 16gb Extreme IIIs and two cheapo Transcend and A-Data 8 gb cards.  That's a lot of memory.

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Woodlands Waterway HDR shots

Another photoshoot with D-dub.  They're not all HDRs, but you'll have to guess which ones aren't. See the rest of them here, Waterway HDR

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New Canon EF-S 18-200mm F3.5-5.6 Lens

Woohoo!  It arrived today, can't wait to really put it to use.  See the unboxing below.

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