A New Experience

Click on enclosed photos to enlarge

We live on the Atlantic coast of Florida, pert-near exactly half way between Jacksonville and Miami.

Big Sis on beach.

It's a sixteen hour drive to visit my family in Louisiana.  I don't see my family much.

In the two years since I had seen my Big Sis, she had gone from someone interested enough in photography to buy a nice Sony super-zoom point and shoot camera to take concert pictures of her many Keith Urban concert attendances, to someone who bought a nice Sony dSLR and had taken photography courses and become truly hooked on landscape photography.

Big Sis came and visited us in Palm Bay in mid-July. 

We had a lot of fun just cramming everyone in the car and going and seeing local stuff that she could not see in Louisiana.

Great Blue Heron.

Lots of bayous in Louisiana, hence lots of opportunity to photography many of the same birds we have down here.  But to her surprise, the same birds down here will let you get as close as ten feet or so before walking away to keep a distance from you and your camera.

Our birds are used to lots of people around, and in fact, they'll stand around near any fishermen, which are pretty much at every park and pier around here, and hope for some fish guts if the the fishermen catch anything.

Needless to say, we took hundreds of photos of birds, boats, sunsets, etc.

But it was just great to have her here, see her and talk with her.  The photography was just icing on the cake.

Amazing Sunset Ends Rainy Day

The first full day she was here will give you an idea of the kind of nice happenings that we encountered while she was here.

She got to our home late on a Tuesday night, so we all slept late the next day, lazed about the house and ate lunch.

By noon it had become overcast and rained a good portion of the afternoon.

Around 6pm, looking east from our home, we could see some blue sky out over the Atlantic.

Stand-up Paddle Boarder / Sunset

We piled in the car and headed toward the beach hoping that the rain would stop enough to get out and take some photos.

We went to the beach, and took some photos, and the clouds above us on the beach began to break up. (see first photo of Big Sis at top of page)

We moved to a park along the Indian River Lagoon (Intercoastal Waterway) where we hoped to see at least a mediocre sunset over the Lagoon.

What ended up happening was one of the best sunsets we have ever seen down here, and we've seen some doozies.

We had several different experiences like this, just getting out regardless of weather, and the weather would clear and create amazing vistas to photograph.

Her week here went by in a flash and it's hard to believe it's already been several weeks since she left.

But we all had a great time with her, and it was a new experience for me to have a close family member to talk photography with.  Lots of fun!

Gorgeous Colors Bring Unforgettable End to an Otherwise Rainy Day

Picture Post, Monday July 9, 2012

You would expect it to be hot in July in Florida, and you would be right.  But that's normal; no one here is blaming the heat on global warming.  It's summer, people!

Sunday June 8, over in the afternoon, after the worst of the heat, I really had the bug to go out and "photograph things."

It's like an itch that MUST be scratched.

One problem.  My back.  Bad day.

What to do?

Go out into the back yard where Lovely Wife was sitting in the shade and Number One Daughter was taking advantage of our swimming pool, and try to find some scenes to photograph in the beautiful slanting evening sunlight.

I was able to get some interesting enough photos to scratch my dire photography itch.

Metal Bird Feeder Holder Thingy with Butterfly Decoration.

 I had looked on them thar internets Sunday afternoon and went through some "slide" shows of mostly street photography.   As a person not from a big city, I have always been fascinated with the slice-of-life views of city street life, especially in black and white.  (Though today's politically correct term for "black and white" photos is now "monochrome."  The term "black and white photography" is deemed by some to be too close to racist.)

After viewing all of that street photography inspiration, I was going to photograph something, even if it was just medicine bottles on my dresser top.  Thankfully, the back yard and the lovely evening sun held enough interesting things to try to photograph in interesting ways to avoid photographing medicine bottles.

I hope you, my occasional visitors, enjoy a few of them.

Lilly Stops at My Feet and Smiles While I Take a Wide Angle Shot of Our Yard.

Hibiscus (I think) Bloom, Framed by the Screened Enclosure Beams.

New Pretty Purple Flowers, Potted by Lovely Wife.

Hummingbird Banner Decoration, White Fence, and Blue Sky.

Fill 'er Up! Living With A Pain Pump.

Went to the back doctor's office yesterday. (Monday)

Got my pain pump refilled.

So my surgically implanted tank is topped off with a very, very, very, very controlled substance.

At the present rate the pump bathes my spinal fluid in this extra liquid, I'm good until the second week of October.

But just to be safe they scheduled me for a refill at the end of September.

They don't want me to come too close to running completely out.

Running out would most likely put me in the hospital, so I'm good with their strict scheduling to ensure that I DON'T run out.

As usual, they had to stick the needle in and then hunt around for the small rubber fill port on the pain pump, but it hurts no more than a wasp sting, which, in turn, hurts infinitely less than my normal back pain.  So, no worries there.

They usually have to stick my arm two or three times to get a vein when giving blood as well, so I guess I'm one of "those people" to the phlebotomists of the world.

Anyhoo, it's good to know the pump is full.  When you get down to the last few days before it is empty, and we cut it close this time, you can't help but worry that something will happen to prevent the refill and it completely run dry.

But it's way better than the time-released oral medicines I used to take.  Easier on my liver and kidneys too since the pain pump dose is tiny compared to the oral dose I once took, and the pain pump medicine goes directly into my spinal fluid anyway so that's a lot of medicine my organs no longer have to process and yet I get better pain relief this way.

Picture Post, Sunday June 12, 2012

Personal Note: Been a long time since I've felt like doing a Sunday Picture Post, people.  I'm excited to have the correct frame of mind for enjoying blogging again.  The pace of blogging is much more my style than is the snake pit that is Facebook.  (The people on Facebook are great, but the program itself is the least intuitive piece of software I've ever had the misfortune to try to work with.  I invariably get irritated and leave Facebook after only a little while.)

This first photo was taken at Space View Park in Titusville, Florida.  Notice NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building across the water.  As a child I loved the whole "space" thing in America.  I still get a kick out of seeing stuff like this. At this park there are monuments to the different space programs, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, with a Space Shuttle Program monument under construction  They also have hand prints and signatures of all the astronauts who were still living when the park was dedicated several years ago.

This black and white photo was taken outside the fence of a beautiful, historic old home in Titusville, Florida.  The yard of the home was expertly manicured, while a few inches away on the outside of the fence was runaway weeds.  Total lawn care failure there, folks.

 

Colorful set of old buildings with hip, modern businesses in them.  Titusville, Florida.

 

 Lovely Wife watches the sunrise with me a couple of weekends ago.  Taken along the Crane Creek Promenade and Manatee Viewing Area in Melbourne, Florida.  We saw no manatees though.  The sunrise had to suffice.  (P.S.  Now that we have hot weather, the manatees have moved out of these creeks and such and into the Indian River Lagoon and Atlantic Ocean.)

 

I thought the "desaturated" look, applied to this photo looked better than my original color and later black and white tries.  The hand-made direction sign and the desaturated look make me think of old family 35mm slides.  Taken at the Melbourne Harbor Marina in Melbourne, Florida.

Y'all have a blessed Sunday!

Angel, My Own Cute Overload

This is Angel, my seven pound buddy.

She follows me around as if I'm the most interesting thing of all.

Leaning Over Backwards (including color photos!)

Photographic truth:  if you take a photo of a building with a wide-angle lens and point that lens up a bit to "get all of it in" then your final photo will have the building look as if it's falling over backwards.

Not only that, but I, personally, have a problem wherein I tend to take photos with the left side of the camera down, i.e., my photos many times lean to the right.

I have wondered why a third of my photos lean to the right because I have the left side of the camera too low when I press the shutter.  All I can come up with is that I'm left-eyed.  Cameras are obviously made for right-handed people, and most right-handed people are right-eyed, BUT, I AM right-handed and LEFT-EYED.  My massive cranium is in a different position than a right-eyed person looking through the viewfinder.  I think this allows me to perceive that my horizons are level when they aren't.

All I can do about that is to continue to remind myself to watch my leveling when I take pictures.  (I've read that many real photographers hate the phrase "taking pictures" and prefer to say "making photographs," but that's how most people say it, and they know what you mean by "taking pictures"  and I feel pretentious when I make myself say "making photographs."  I blame my Louisiana public school upbringing. Rant over.)

 Anyway, back to the subject of wide angle photos of buildings resulting in the leaning-backwards look.

Here's a photo of mine from last week that exhibits both of the problems I've mentioned; the wide-angle leaning-back look, and also my personal issue of dropping the left side of the camera.

Historic Pritchard House, Titusville, Florida.

See?  The house leans back because of the wide angle lens pointed a bit upward, and leans to the right because I have trouble keeping my camera straight.  This how the photo looks just off of the camera, except for the border and copyright notice I added.

But most modern digital photo manipulation programs, I currently use Photoshop Elements 9 (thanks Big Sis!!), have a "perspective correction" set of tools to correct the leaning back issue, and I used these perspective correction tools to repair the back lean in this photograph.   I also used these tools in this case to level the photo from my leaning of the camera.  (There's an easier leveling tool to us in Elements, but since I was already using the perspective control tools, I chose to rotate and level the photo there instead of the other leveling tool. I use as few tools and steps as I can to fix any problems.)

Here is a screen capture of my work on this photograph within Photoshop Elements 9:

Adjusting the perspective (and leveling) to correct this image.

You'll notice that the photo itself is now all kinds of bent and twisted, no longer a neat rectangle.  But the grid lines, along with the various sliders there on the right allowed me to level and rotate the house and "tip the house toward me" so that the vertical lines on the edges of the home are straight up and down, correcting the leaning-back look.  Notice that the image now looks as if I had a print of it in front of me and leaned it toward me until the house no longer leaned back.

Then I just had to crop the photo back into a rectangle, losing a bit of the photo all the way around, put my border and copyright on it, and save it in it's new and improved (to me) form, here:

New and improved photo of the Pritchard House.

So along with getting into the habit of making sure all my photos are level, I need to learn to leave more room around my main subject to allow for a little cropping after using the perspective correction tool.

Making those two corrections in my photo taking, and getting better with my computer "darkroom" skills, will make life easier when wanting to corrects an age old problem in photography, the leaning-backwards building.

In all the years I shot photos on slide and print film, the leaning-backward building was just a part of life.

Yet another reason I love modern digital cameras and our digital darkrooms on our computers!

Nuts! Guitar Nuts, That Is

Warning!  Boring guitar information ahead.

Samick strat, nut making trial subject.

When you are on a budget, and want expensive things, you can save and save and buy that expensive, quality guitar, or you can also look to find less expensive guitars.

I have chosen the latter course over the years.

I have several cheap guitars that were made of quality woods.  The manufacturers cut costs by using cheap hardware such as the tuning keys, bridges, and electronics.

Over time, I have slowly bought a quality set of pickups here, a quality set of tuning keys there, etc., and upgraded these inexpensive guitars to where they are pretty close to first-rate in quality at every point.

One problem though.

One of THE most important parts of a guitar is the nut.  That's the little sliver of plastic (on cheap guitars) where the strings come from the headstock and the tuning keys and lay in slots cut into the nut.

New nut, after initial shaping, slotting.

Other than wanting your guitar to have great tone, you want it to "play" good.  To feel good in your hands and for the strings to be easy to press down to the frets, yet not be so close that they buzz on adjacent frets, a sign that the nut slots were cut too deep.

A guitar string is suspended from the nut, and doesn't touch anything until it is suspended at the other end at the bridge.  Between these two points, a guitar string can vibrate.

I have upgraded my several inexpensive guitars over the years with new pickups and wiring and other hardware, to the point where they all sound GREAT.

But that nagging problem of a cheap nut with hastily cut slots of improper depth kept my guitars from also FEELING great when I played them.

So, also over time, I bought a small set of files, a few pieces of cow bone that where pre-cut to just bigger than a guitar nut needs to be, and I also read how-to's on shaping and slotting guitar nuts over and over and over.

A few weeks ago I finally started with my cheapest guitar, a $50 purchase from a friend at work, a Samick super-strat style guitar.  Shaped and looks much like a Fender Stratocaster with higher output pickups, but is a cheap copy by someone else.

I loosened and moved the strings out of the way and took off the old nut.  (How isn't important)

Finished slotted, shaped nut, installed.

I roughly shaped the piece of bone I had to where it was as close to the same dimensions as the original nut, and also began the slots in the new nut.

I then installed the new nut onto the guitar, and using the techniques from all my repeated reading of nut making articles, carefully cut each slot to the correct width and correct depth for each string.

After resetting the strings and playing a bit to make sure all was well, I moved the strings again and sanded down the top of the nut to where the strings were actually partially out the the slots.

The slots and the pressure of the tight strings keep the strings in the slots, but having the strings about half way buried in the slot when in place helps keep the string from being snagged or caught in the slot, which creates tuning problems.

After the success of my first, cheapest guitar nut replacement, I was able to confidently make new nuts for my other guitars over the course of a week or so.  (I can only sit there doing this for short periods, and had to take frequent back relieving breaks.)

This was the final step in upgrading my cheap guitars, but every one of them now sounds and plays much like guitars costing many times what I paid for them, including new parts.

Good times, good times.

Ready for years of easy play!

Eugene Polley Died this Week! (May 23, 2012)

(Antonio Perez, Chicago Tribune / January 8, 2006)

Couch potatoes the world over engage in a moment of reverent silence to remember the inventor of the TV remote control, Eugene Polley.

He died at the age of 96 in Chicago a couple of days ago.

In 1935 Eugene Polley started work with Zenith as a stock clerk, and eventually his natural engineering genius led him to receive 18 (eighteen!!!!!) patents and rose to the level of assistant chief of their mechanical engineering group.

Awesome for a college drop-out.

R.I.P. Mr. Polley, ya done good.

(Here's an L.A. Times article about Mr. Polley if you want to know more...)

My World Has Gotten Small

Mr. Spike, miniature poodle, hoodie up.

(sprinkled throughout this post are some of the photos I took today, click to enlarge them)

I really haven't blogged in a while.

I keep trying to start again, but life keeps intervening and I slack off and then stop.

I loved blogging and keeping up with other's blogs, It's all done at the perfect pace for me.  Or at least the me of a few years ago.

Now even the blogger's pace is too fast for me to keep up.

Most of my life I have had a very high pain tolerance.  I could shake off mashing a finger, flat-out ignore stubbing a toe, calmly clean and bandage a cut, and put salve on a burn and go back to cooking or whatever.

So lately I've been really trying to fight harder to deal with my back pain like I do with a smashed finger, but it's much harder to just ignore and keep moving with the back pain.

There are levels of pain that can absolutely shut a person down, period.  Trying to ignore massive pain is like trying to tell a person in deep depression to "just snap out of it."  Those words are less than useless to a depressed person, likewise, even the most concentrated effort of will is not enough to override certain pain levels.

Arm out window paparazzi style shot.

I hope you never, ever, ever feel this kind of physical pain.

The past few years, my back pain had gotten to the point that it pretty much ruined my life in many ways.

A life-long love of photography and the simple joy of going to places and taking long, meandering walks with my camera came to a screeching halt.

Daily I count my blessing, and make no mistake, I am blessed with a great wife, kids, house, pets, family, etc., but daily chronic pain makes the entire experience of living like trying to do intricate, tedious work with a police siren in the room.

I can't sit at the computer to work in Photoshop Elements very long, and that's just as fun to me as taking the photos in the first place.  I was BORN to be a digital photographer, and the pain just "crimps my style" in almost every aspect of life.  All those years with print and slide film and darkroom work were fun, but I love the digital photography of today so much more.

I have a Facebook account, but don't find that very fun.  It's a blessing to keep up with long-lost friends from high school, or old work-mates that I hadn't seen in many years, but something about it doesn't get me excited.  Working on Facebook seems more like a chore than fun.  Mainly because the interface is so unintuitive to me that just adding photos to a particular photo album takes me long enough to want to just give up.

Mercury 7 Astronaut Memorial, Titusville, Florida

 Today, I had to get ready and Number Two Daughter took me to an appointment in Titusville, about a 40 minute drive from home.

Since I was up and out and heading to a place I don't go often, I took my camera.

After taking care of business, we went to Space View Park in Titusville, on the Indian River Lagoon, on the mainland directly across from Kennedy Space Center.

You can see the huge Vehicle Assembly Building across the waterway on the beachside island.

Gemini Astronaut Memorial. See NASA Vehicle Assembly. Building in distance (right side)?

At this park, which is in several sections, are monuments to the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs and the astronauts and workers that were involved.  The monument to the Space Shuttle program is presently under construction.

Apollo Astronaut Memorial. Earth and Moon represented on the A's cross.

The park is so spread out that, for me, it was a very hard but incredibly enjoyable time of taking photo and walking with my daughter.  By the end though, I kept noticing that I was walking stooped over like an elderly man.

It was fun, but it hurt.

That pretty much sums up my life right now.  I'm blessed and thank God for all my blessings daily, but to do a simple thing like get out and slowly walk around for an hour or so leaves me pleased but hurting.

I guess all I can do is get up tomorrow, and if the pain is just low enough, try my best to do something else that I want to do.

My world and my thoughts are much smaller than they used to be.

Vicks Melts Boogers Best

This Is A Public Service Announcement.

I have sleep apnea and sleep with a CPAP machine to aid breathing while sleeping. (CPAP=Continuous Positive Airway Pressure)

If one's nose is even the slightest bit stopped-up, the CPAP makes you feel as if someone is suffocating you.

So, gotta clear those nasal passages!

After trying Afrin, Flonase, and every major brand and every store brand nose spray, I can say with confidence that Vicks Sinex Ultra Fine Mist melts boogers best.  It's not even close.

If by some miracle some employee of Vicks sees this, feel free to use this statement in your advertisements.

It's flat-out better to sleep without the dang CPAP if you can't clear your nose.

Only one problem.  Vicks Sinex Ultra Fine Mist is the most expensive nose spray.  It works great but costs way too much for such a small bottle.

I know, dumb subject for a blog post, but if you EVER use a nose spray, Vicks Sinex Ultra Fine Mist is THE best.  Period.

If your nose starts stopping-up when you lay down, like mine does, just go buy the Vicks.  It lasts all night.

Picture Post, Sunday October 2, 2011

Been a long time since I've had a Sunday Picture Post.

I used to do this every Sunday, with no shortage of photos.  I was always shooting new photos and had the time and energy to re-size the images for the blog, so, no problem having new photos to show every Sunday.

Shows just how much chronic pain can take from a person.  I've barely posted on this blog in two years.

That's two hobbies down the drain because of my ruined back and always being in pain.

A person just doesn't feel up to doing much of anything.  I know I sound like a whiner here, but if I didn't mention the pain and the problems that result, I would have nothing to say.  It has pretty much been my life the past few years.  So bear with me.

This pain pump has helped the pain some, but right now I'm just at a point where the pain pump's pain relief is about equal to all the oral pain medicine I used to take's effects.  Pain Doc and I have a ways to go yet in getting the dosage adjustments ideal for me and my life.  You have to walk the edge between how much pain you can deal with and how much you can function with morphine in you.

There's a good thing though.  A pain pump literally puts into my spine on the order of 1/100th the amount of pain medicine I once took orally.  Same pain relief, less pills to take, easier on my liver and kidneys.

Lovely Wife and I went yesterday, October 1st, for an afternoon drive.

Visited a beautiful local park, the Atlantic Ocean, and walked for a little way along 5th Avenue in Indialantic, Florida.

I had my camera, and had the first photography excursion I've had in at least a year.

I enjoyed it so much, being with my wife and seeing this beautiful area up close for the first time in way too long.  Yeah, it made my back hurt like crazy and my left leg was hurting and ended up numb, and I could barely get out of the car on my own when we got home after only a couple of hours of mostly riding.  But then I kicked back in my recliner for a while and slowly the pain lessened somewhat.

Such is a life in pain.  Gotta get up and struggle like crazy just to have a short walk and a car ride with my wife and my camera.

It was worth it though.  I was going stir crazy in the house.

I've seen many, many AMAZING sunsets in fifteen years in Florida; yesterday's was certainly one of the most beautiful.

These photos are fresh!  Less than 24 hours old as of posting time.

A Gold Rolex Oyster (Thinking about my Dad)

(I've copied here, my most recent post from my photography blog. The photos are of my Dad's Rolex that I took this week. I was thinking about him a lot.)

My father worked on off-shore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico in his career.

He was born in 1934, growing up during difficult times in America, and in a poor part of Louisiana.

He was of what I consider to be the last generation that a man or woman would work for one company most of their lives.

Working off-shore, seven days on the drilling rig, and then seven days off, he ended up missing a lot of holidays and birthdays. He was there for a lot of them, but not for a lot of others too.

There were times, like working for any company, when he had to swallow his pride and keep his mouth shut to keep his job when the company would try to take advantage of him or others.

Then, when he had twenty-something years with this company, they called all the twenty-plus-year employees to a big banquet in New Orleans.

The company presented to him and all the other long-timers, a gold Rolex watch.

I don't know if it still is, but for decades, the official United States time was determined by an atomic clock at the US Naval Observatory.

So after he was given this watch, and I'd talk to him on the phone (from Dallas or Atlanta or wherever we were living during those years) I'd ask if the Naval Observatory has called yet that day to get the official time from him and his Rolex.

It wasn't something he left in a box, he wore the watch daily up until he died in 1994.

I took a few photos this week with my new/used macro lens.

You can see a few nicks and marks here and there.

Those nicks and marks are from him wearing one of the only tangible representations of all the years of hard work he put in, as well as not being with his family on some important days.

Some people would think he was being pretentious wearing a Gold Rolex, and sometimes complete strangers would say something like, "I wish I could afford to buy and wear a gold Rolex!"

He would always tell them, "I didn't have the money to buy one either. This was given to me by the company I worked so hard for, for so many years. I wear it because I EARNED IT."

That never failed to shut them up.

I don't wear it as much as I'd like to, mainly because my wrist is way bigger than his was, and even at the last notch, the watch is too tight to wear for more than just a few minutes.

One day I'll go ahead and plunk down the money to have an extra gold link or two put on the watch so I can wear it more.

But I look at this watch a lot, and suffer wearing it on important days for me and my family.

It helps me remember that he's with me in spirit on those important days to me and my family.

Guitar String Vibration

When I was in college, we had to do a couple of experiments in Physics lab class to study string vibrations.

Frequency, nodes, etc.

When a guitar string is pressed against a fret and that string is plucked, it sets off a pretty complex set of vibrations.

Since they are not plucked in the exact center of each string, guitar strings vibrate both at the fundamental note's frequency and also there are a whole host of harmonic vibrations at frequencies mathematically related to the frequency of the fundamental note.

The physical construction of the guitar influences the vibrations of the strings in response to the string's vibrations making the various pieces of the guitar vibrate. Even a solid body electric guitar can have it's tone greatly enhanced by being crafted of as few solid pieces of good wood as possible, and these tone woods will impart some harmonic influence back to the strings and out through the amplifier.

This is why guitars can be SO EXPENSIVE. The highest quality, large pieces of tone woods are as expensive to buy as they are resonant and beautiful to look at.

Yeah, there are a lot of cheap guitars in the world, and a surprising number of them sound good and play good too, but when a guitar is constructed from high quality pieces of properly dried woods, this wood can impart back to the strings even richer harmonic content resulting in a great sounding guitar whose tone is thick with harmonic content that is pleasing to the human ear.

For me this following very short video is mind blowing. I love this kind of stuff.

Although I knew the principles of string vibrations, I've never seen them in real-time action.

This video was simply shot with a camera with a high speed shutter, so that when the video is watched at the normal speed of the song, you can hear AND see the dramatic ways in which the strings vibrate.

Notice that the fingering and plucking of the strings are in time to the sound of the music. Although it almost looks like slow motion, it's not.



I wish we had been shown a video similar to this in Physics lab, studying string vibrations would have made a lot more sense, a picture (video) painting a thousand words and all that.

I Have A New Hard Drive, Sort Of

WARNING: Boring computer geek post ahead...

With all the photos that I have on my computer, I was really nervous about a hard drive failure robbing me of all my digital images.

So a couple of years ago I bought an external hard drive, a 500GB one. That was massively huge two or three years ago, but now you can get 2TB (TeraBytes) hard drives for a reasonable price.

Then, about six months ago, I became worried as my external hard drive was filling up with 35mm slide scans, digital photos, and print scans from the flatbed scanner.

I bought a second external hard drive, this time a 1TB one. Pretty huge.

Then about two months after getting the 1TB hard drive, the original 500GB external drive I had bought stopped working.

I was so glad that I had bought that second external drive. I lost no photos.

When we got some tax money earlier this year, I got a subscription to Carbonite, an online backup company that claims to have unlimited backup for a certain price per year.

They truly have unlimited backup, but if you are like me and want to back up a pretty massive amount of data somewhere other than your own home for the ultimate backup, then the backup takes a LONG time.

See, Carbonite works in the background on your computer and only can upload about 4 GibaBytes per 24 hours. But I let it do it's thing and haven't heard any complaints from Carbonite about me having too much stuff to back up.

Lately, as I have felt better after my surgery, I've been spending time at the computer here and there as pain levels permit, and have organized and thrown away a bunch of computer files so that my Carbonite backup will be as small and convenient as possible for both them and me.

But that 500GB hard drive dying on me bothered me a lot, so I began looking for web sites where folks mentioned the problem I had with this particular hard drive and it turns out that one major problem was a recent firmware upgrade release that I, and others apparently, put on our external hard drives.

This latest firmware (similar to software but used to program a particular chip on the circuit board that controls things, in my case how the hard drive operates) killed mine, and anyone else's who upgraded to the latest revision.

But I had noticed that even though I couldn't use that external hard drive any more, I COULD hear it spinning when power was applied to it.

I began to think that the hard drive itself wasn't dead, but just the control interface within the cover of the external hard drive case.

Now you know engineers LOVE taking things apart, so I broke out my tools and went to town and freed the hard drive from the enclosure. I have to say that Western Digital makes a first-class, rugged hard drive enclosure for their external drives.

I turned off and unplugged my desktop computer, opened the case, stole the SATA cable from my CD/DVD reader-writer (which I don't use much) and installed the "broken" 500GB hard drive into my desktop computer.

I turned the computer on and what do you know, I had a 500GB internal drive show up with all my old files still sitting there pretty as you please.

Now I have the original 250GB internal drive, another internal drive which used to be an external 500GB drive, and also a 1TB external drive.

I have all my files backed up at home, and many of them backed up on Carbonite too, in case something drastic disaster happens to my home computer.

I'm still sending stuff to Carbonite as it finishes each batch I sent it previously.

But I won't be through worrying until I have all of my digital images uploaded to them as well.

Since I have a copy of every file I have on that one external 1TB drive, if something happens while I'm at home, I can just grab that one external hard drive that's the same size as a hardback book, and skee-daddle.

P.S. I bought another SATA cable that allowed me to reattach my CD/DVD drive and now have my complete computer again. I know you were worried about that temporarily unconnected CD/DVD drive.

I Dodge Vicious Angry Killer Bird to Get Egg Photo!

Lovely Wife was out on our back patio yesterday evening reading a book on her much-loved Kindle.

We have a mockingbird out there that yells and squawks at us whenever anyone goes out in the back yard.

She noticed that the bird kept flying to our crepe myrtle bush, and realized that there's a nest in there.

She and Number One Daughter are too short to see into the nest to look for eggs. They called me out, and I could barely see over the edge and saw at least two eggs.

Lovely Wife's camera battery was dead so I got my camera and did a paparazzi style hold-the-camera-up-high-and-point-and-shoot-and-hope-you-get-a-good-shot impression.

The resulting egg pic came out OK, and as you can see, there are four of them.

Pretty cool. I hadn't seen real, wild bird eggs in many years. Probably since I was a kid.

Here's a pic of the Mom/Dad (don't know which) up on a wire right above and behind the crepe myrtle and nest.

I can hardly believe it's beak is closed in the photo, this rascal yammers on incessantly.

Don't Buy Expensive HDMI cables for Your TV

...or, Let Me Save Y'all Some Money

OK, there's lots of hyperbole out there about cables for computers, for TVs and whatnot.

But as a digital engineer, let me tell you a little secret that Best Buy, Target, or even Walmart won't tell you.

It's a fact, if you buy a TV at Best Buy or similar place, they'll try hard to sell you on buying a high dollar, high quality HDMI cable.

If you have bought or are about to buy a new television set, you will actually need to purchase a HDMI cable iffen you want to see high-definition programs and movies on your new TV.

H-D-M-I means high definition multimedia interface.

Here's the secret: Just buy a cheap HDMI cable that has the correct length for your needs. A cheap HDMI cable works EVERY BIT as good as a $100 Monster brand HDMI cable.

Why? How?

Glad you asked.

Here's a couple of simple truths about electronic signals traveling on a cable:
1. Digital signals, or pulses on an electric cable such as an HDMI one are either on, or off, there's no almost in digital. So, if the cable, no matter how cheap, actually carries the digital signal from the cable box to your TV, it will be presenting to your TV a signal every bit as good as a $100 Monster brand cable. One digital cable either works AS GOOD AS the next digital cable, or it isn't working at all. Period.
2. This wasn't necessarily true with analog cables. A better-built, nicely shielded from interference analog cable could possibly give your TV a clearer signal than a cheap cable, resulting in a better, less fuzzy picture on the screen.

The rationale they will throw at you at Best Buy is that you don't want to buy a cheap cable to go with your new $700 TV. But in the digital world, in which all new TV's firmly sit, if the cable works at all, it will give your TV as good a signal, and therefore screen picture, as any other cable, regardless of price.

When you buy that next TV, and you will need an HDMI cable to actually see programs in high definition, just buy that $14.99 cable and don't worry your pretty little head about it.

If your new HDMI cable happens to be faulty and not work, just exchange it for a working one just like you would with a new shirt you brought home and then found it was torn somewhere. (We do live in an imperfect world where you sometimes buy something that doesn't work, from the git-go.)

Now, go forth and buy a cheap HDMI cable of the correct length. Use the money you saved to buy a Blu-Ray DVD or three.

Color Photos of America's Depression Era

Kodak's Kodachrome 35mm slide film still is, in my opinion, one of the great inventions of man. (Photo is copyright Library of Congress)

The UK's Daily Mail has published a page of stunning color images from America's depression era (just after Kodachrome was invented). Please go see these photo's.

They offer a totally different perspective than the harsh-but-compelling black and white depression photos we've seen all our lives.

Kodachrome images look so "thick" and dense with color.

Lord I miss the look of Kodachrome, but I love and have totally embraced digital photography. (I spent many hours in Photoshop Elements one weekend to come up with my own process for making digital images have the look of Kodachrome.)

Note: I hate linking stuff from online newspapers, the link may be dead fairly quick. So take a minute to go look at these images.

Goodbye Mr. Surgeon

Had my second and last post operation visit with the surgeon who installed my pain pump.

Said my incisions (all three!) were looking healthy and that unless they somehow get infected or I start having some of the bad side effects some pain pump recipients get, that, well, it was nice knowing me.

I see Pain Doctor next week for my first visit with him since the surgery.

Pain Doctor will use a remote control device that communicates through my skin to the pain pump to adjust the dose. (That's a photo to the right, of the same pain pump and catheter I now have, and the gizmo Pain Doctor will use to program the rate of medicine release.)

Ready to crank this puppy up a bit.

I received a medic alert type card with my pain pump info on it in the mail a couple of weeks ago, but yesterday finally read all the material that came with it.

I had carefully inspected the card to ensure all was correct, but after reading the associated letter, I needed to change the doctor's name and number on the card from the surgeon's name to Pain Doctor's name and number.

The card needs to have the doctor's info for the doctor filling and adjusting the pain pump instead of the surgeon.

I got an email today telling me my new implant ID card is on the way.

I thought it might be a good idea to get a medic alert ID bracelet or necklace and put the fact that I'm diabetic and that I now have this pain pump on the necklace or bracelet.

On several sites they mentioned that most paramedics are trained to look for a medic alert necklace or bracelet, and don't look in people's wallets.

That's good to know. I guess I'll have to buy me some BLING in the near future.

So much for my spiffy medic alert card I put in my wallet, eh?

New Body Parts Installed or Been a Long Time Since I Posted

I can summarize my life pretty quickly since my last post in September of 2010.

Lots of back pain. Trying to work, sleep, live with lots of pain. I pretty much stunk at everything, work, relationships, life in general.

Last summer (2010) I did the trial for a "neurostimulator" or more simply, spinal cord stimulator, or what is basically a TENS unit where the electrodes that zap you are inserted in your back close to the spinal cord. This device is effective for some, but in me, they could never get the device to "buzz" in the areas where I hurt, lower back and outside left leg/butt. There are electrodes for the final two inches or so, and it's this section of the electrical cord which is implanted along the inside of the vertebrae close to the spinal cord. The Here's a brief run-down of these devices on Spine-Health.com, one of my most frequently visited sites (http://www.spine-health.com/treatment/back-surgery/spinal-cord-stimulation-chronic-pain).

So for me, the spinal cord stimulator trial was a failure, and my Pain Management Doctor and I started talking about one of the final tricks he had up his sleeve.

Intrathecal Pain Pump. Or just Pain Pump to many. Similar idea to the spinal cord stimulator, but with a pain pump, a catheter is inserted into the intrathecal space of the spine. This is the same protective sack where the spinal cord lies and in which our spinal fluid flows slowly from lower back, up to and around the brain, and back down the spine.

The idea is to deliver minute amounts of pain medication directly into the spinal fluid, allowing it to flow up and down with the spinal fluid and delivering some of the most powerful pain relief that can be given these days.

All along this path, work really sucked. I just hurt too much to be a great engineer, and I couldn't really take high enough doses of pain medicine to really cut the pain without drastically cutting my brain power, which is essential in the engineering world.

I've been on disability since earlier this year, and I have slowly gone through the process with my Pain Doctor to have a pain pump trial (it was deemed successful in me), visit a neurosurgeon he referred me to, get all the pre-surgery health checks done, and to have surgery to have the pain pump and catheter installed permanently.

First, the pain pump trial. in February, I went into a day-surgery center and Pain Doctor and crew sedated me a bit, and then using a fluoroscope, which is basically a live-action x-ray machine, gave me a tiny shot of morphine straight into the intrathecal space in my spine.

I've had so many shots and surgeries in my back that from the middle of my back down to almost my rear end is mostly scar tissue. But one of the beauties of the pain pump and the flow of spinal fluid up and down is that they can inject the medicine in any place along the spine and the medicine will flow with the spinal fluid, hopefully delivering sweet pain relief along the way.

I stayed at the surgery center for several hours for them to make sure that I wasn't having serious side effects from the bolus of morphine in my spine and during that time felt my pain levels really decrease. They sent me home and I was to keep a journal of sorts and to stay off oral pain meds as long as I could.

I lasted about 36 hours, but I left it too long before starting my oral medications again.

I got a good bit of pain relief for the first 24 hours and then the pain slowly started increasing again. When I took my first oral meds at the 36 hour mark I didn't know it, but the pain pendulum was swinging back to serious pain really, really fast.

It took me a couple of days to carefully dole out to myself doses of oral pain meds until the pain was back to where I could even sleep.

But the initial pain relief of the directly applied morphine was what they wanted to see, and after weeks of doctors visits and pre-surgery checks had my pain pump installed in late April at Sebastian River Medical Center in Sebastian, Florida. That's near the neurosurgeon's office and about 15-20 miles south of where we live in Palm Bay.

I had an incision along my spine for the surgeon to put the catheter tip into the intrathecal space push it up in there a couple of inches along my spinal cord.

Then they "tunneled" around my side to create a path for the flexible catheter to reach around to my front left side where another incision was made to implant the actual pain pump filled with morphine.

They also had to make a small incision on my left side to help continue the tunneling for the catheter to reach around from my back to my front.

Total, 3 incisions to heal from. Though I was able to get up easier than after my previous surgeries since they hadn't actually worked on or ground away bone, I've had a heckuva time with three incisions healing.

I'm still a week away from my first visit with Pain Doctor since my surgery, but the surgery incisions have healed enough that I can feel the pain pump having a little bit of positive effect on my pain level.

The surgeon filled the pain pump, but only set it at a super-low release rate, enough to make the pump work until Pain Doctor could see me and I had healed enough to start ramping up the the delivery rate of the pain pump.

As of today, I'm slow moving, but doing pretty well. The incisions have been slow to heal and are still pretty sore, even three weeks on.

I'm basically still in the same pain situation as before the surgery, but the fact that I can now feel the light effects of the pain pump helping gives me hope that in the coming months we can get the device adjusted to where I don't have to take much oral meds.

The initial goal is to stop taking my long acting pain meds and then only have to occasionally take a quick acting pain medicine for "breakthrough" pain as needed. Getting off the long acting stuff will be a big relief to my liver and kidneys from the years of daily oral pain medications.

The pain pump can possibly give as good relief as long acting oral pain medications, but at the rate of only 1/200 or so of what I would take orally.

In other words, you have to take a pretty big dose of oral pain medicine to help lower serious pain levels, but with the pain pump's direct delivery to the spinal fluid, many patients get the same pain relief with 1/200th of what they were taking orally.

Just tiny, tiny amounts are delivered by the pain pump in a 24 hour period but with the same effect as hefty doses of oral pain medications.

Anyway, if anyone is still out there, and you've read this far, I'll throw you a bone and stop here.

I'm still not out of the woods yet, but the pain pump system is successfully implanted in me. It seems to be giving a bit of help to my pain levels, and should help more and more as I resume visits with Pain Doctor who will fill the pump and adjust the release rate of it's medicines from here on out.

If you are interested, follow this link for a short video on the pain pump (http://www.spine-health.com/video/intrathecal-pump-implant-video). Just click on the "Play animation without narration" link in the frame, and then start clicking the "Next Step" button to continue the very short animated views of how the pain pump system is installed. It's only about a minute long. A picture will make all that I wrote here come clear with just a glance as to how the pieces are placed.

I seriously hope to resume blogging, I miss it very much. It's a great release valve for me.

Until next time...God bless you.

Picture Post, Sunday September 26, 2010

My Big Sis and her Number Two Son came to Florida and visited us in June. A HUGE blessing to us.

Here are a few photos from when they were here.

We took Big Sis and Nephew Number Two to a restaurant in Sebastian, Florida, that is called Squid Lips. We'd always wanted to eat there, but finally took the chance. Wow, the food was good! How could you not want to eat at a restaurant called Squid Lips?

Here's the fambly at our table in Squid Lips. It's open to the Indian River Lagoon. It was a hot day, but surprisingly comfortable in the restaurant.

Then we went to the beach. Here's a photo of Big Sis and Nephew Number Two.

This is looking north along the beach...

...and this is looking south along the beach.

As you can tell, the water was all turquoise like it is in photos of the Bahamas, and the beach had almost no one on there, except that one couple with their blue umbrella. We were so disgusted at this turn of events that we didn't stay long, and left in a huff.

You know I'm kidding, right? These photos were taken the second week of June, and this beach was deserted. IT WAS PERFECT!