Our web diary

Gas station credit card fees

I saw this AP article on Yahoo about a gas station in West Virginia not taking credit cards because the fees are higher because of the cost of fuel.

"
His complaints target the so-called interchange fee — a percentage of the sale price paid to credit card companies on every transaction. The percentage is fixed — usually at just under 2 percent — but the dollar amount of the fee rises with the price of the goods or services
"

Now I take credit cards for my business and I don't understand the logic in this statement. Merchant accounts charge two fees. The first fee is a transaction fee. This is a flat fee just for processing the card. The second fee is the discount rate. Usually between 1-4% depending on the deal with your processor and the dollar volume amount of your transactions. You get a better deal if you process $100000 transactions a month vs. someone processing $1000 a month.

My processor charges 24 cents per transaction and somewhere between 1.5% and 1.75% for Visa/MC transactions (Amex/Disc have their own rates) Using those numbers I did some calculations.

The charge amount is the dollar amount of the purchase. The discount is the amount based on the discount fee from Visa/MC. The Trans Fee is the per transaction fee. The total is the total of those two fees. Gallons is number of gallons purchased. I used $5.00 a gallon to make the numbers easier. The cost per Gallon column is the how much that cost the retailer per gallon

Charge Discount Trans Fee Total Gallons Cost per Gallon
$10 $0.18 $0.24 $0.42 2 $0.21
$100 $1.75 $0.24 $1.99 20 $.10

On the 2 gallon purchase the total works out to about 4% of the total sale and the 20 gallon purchase works out to about 2% of the total sale. These percentages are the SAME if gas is $2 a gallon or $5 a gallon.

Since the rates remain the same, regardless of the price of fuel, I dont think the price of gas is hurting the gas stations with credit card fees. What is probably more true is that people are putting less in their tank per trip to gas station. Meaning the stations are not able to allocate that fee over more gallons of gas.

I used numbers for a small retailer. Service stations generally dont remain in business if they do not sell at least 80000 gallons in gas a month. So even A small service station probably gets much better discount rate and smaller transaction fees than a small retailer.

I guess what bothers me about this is that you will soon see people asking congress to intervene on this issue and we will have another case of our government getting involved in something that should be settled by the markets.

Charlotte Area Transit System

This is a link to a great article about the Charlotte Area Transit System. We just spent over half-billion dollars on a new, 9 mile long, train set. In my opinion, that money would have been better spent on developing cross town routes and doing road improvements.

Church Pictorial

New website launched. www.churchpictorial.com

Ebay 2

This is for the Ebayers out there.

This is a video of a Sony UPDR100 s/n 15356 working. Ebay Item 150187836727

www.rivinus.com/15356.wmv

This is a video of a Sony UPDR100 s/n 14160 working. Ebay Item 150187838484

www.rivinus.com/14160.wmv

Pictures of these and the other items I am selling can be viewed here

http://www.rivinus.com/gallery/Ebay2007

Golf Photography Website

I launched a new Golf Event Photography website yesterday.

Leopard (OS X 10.5) Compatibility issues

Caught this from Luminous Landscape today. Kind of suprised me because I thought Mac always played well with everyone.

Promise Technology Smartstor NS4300N

This is my solution for storage after I returned my Drobo. I purchased my hard drives from Global Computer. With Global you can only exchange defective drives. You may not just return them without paying additional fees. I was able to swap the Western Digital Caviar Drives for Seagate Barracuda 500GB 3gbs SATA drives.

So, since I returned the Drobo, I needed a place to put all those drives. I went searching back through my notes from my initial storage search. At this point, I knew that I wanted an empty enclosure, with a Gigabit port, a print server and at a price between $400-500. I had seen something like what I wanted on the Dell website. However, both the Intel and US Robotics product only supports SATA 150 and the drives I own are SATA-300. It seemed a waste to not have that extra transfer speed.

Along comes a Promise. I found this product with a google search. It looked like something that could be right for me. I had never heard or Promise Technologies, but felt more comfortable after doing some google research. The device met all of my requirements including SATA-300 for the drives.

The is not a product listed on Global Computer's website, but the sales rep that helped with my return said that he could order it. It was about $435.00 with shipping, so it was actually cheaper than my Drobo. I also ordered a Linksys - SD2005 Gibabit switch and a PC Gibabit adapter for my primary desktop.

The device arrived on Monday. I have to admit that the NS4300N was not as easy to install as the Drobo. You have to screw the drives into a carrier (orange things in the picture). I have never liked dealing with tiny hard drive screws. It took about 10 minutes to get the drives out of the bags and into the carriers. It went more quickly after the carriers were done. Just insert the carriers into the NS4300N, connect the ethernet cable from the NAS to the switch and plug in the power.

The NS4300N takes about a minute to wake after pushing the power button located on the front. It cycles through the lights and then gives a loud beep that says it's ready. It noticed that I am still missing one drive which should arrive from Global tomorrow.

The next step is to install the supplied NAS utility onto one of the computers. I think all of this does is initialize the drive and allow you to initially communicate to the SmartStor device. The reason I say that is that, in Windows, you just go the My Network Places and browse to the drive using it's IP address.

The NAS utility seemed to hiccup at first. It was looking for the factory default IP address for the box vs. the one assigned by the router. This was easily changed in the setup utility.

The next step was to open the Promise Advanced Storage Utility. This allows you to do more advanced NAS management. You can setup backups, email event notifications, users, workgroups, etc. I setup the email notifications, Raid 5 and enabled the USB print server. I have an HP 2600N that had been hooked into one of my older desktops and is now hooked directly to the SmartStor.

It's ALOT faster than the Drobo. It took about 3 hours to move over 276GB of data onto the unit. This was almost twice as fast as the Drobo. I don't think this is because of the Gigabit wiring because it was all still coming off a FW800 Drive. I did then same test from the earlier post with 2.5 GB of data from a connected laptop. It took 3 minutes and 20 seconds vs 12 minutes of the same data to the Drobo. So I am happy.

I have a UPS attached to the SmartStor, but I am will be running crash tests over the next few days to see how stable the unit is if the power goes out.

Overall I am happy, or will be after the crash tests, with the unit. It has a great form factor, is quiet and works as I expected. The Promise website says it will only address 3TB vs. 4TB for the Drobo, but I would not be surprised if a firmware update comes out to fix this limitation.

Drobo a No Go

I had recently posted about receiving a new Drobo storage unit. I was really excited about the potential of this product. The ability to easily upgrade to larger drives as they got cheaper, plus the easy installation were great selling points. It really was as easy setup to open the box, open the drives, plug the drive into the unit, plug in everything and the software CD. All good for Drobo. Or so I thought

One of my drives arrived DOA. I am fairly comfortable with this because I heard a clunking sound when the drive spun up. So I sent it back to Gobal Computer. This was Friday and the drive left the same day I got the RA number. I have NEVER had a hard drive fail in my 24 odd years of owning computers (god I am getting old). This left me feeling pretty comfortable about using Drobo with the remaining three drives. So on Friday night I started moving Data over onto the Drobo.

The first data test was a speed run. I use a 10/100 network via a Linksys wireless router. I tried moving 2.5GB from a laptop downstairs to the Drobo. No fancy speed meter here, just watched the clock. 2.5GB took 14 minutes from one of my laptops to the Drobo. Jason had posted that he was interested in seeing the transfer rates. So I took the same amount of data and transfered it to an external FW800 drive I had connected to the same desktop. That transfer took 7 minutes. So the Drobo, as expected, was no speed demon,

On Saturday night, I started moving more data over to the Drobo. I started with some Norton backups of last years business data. This was a 178 GB volume that I had planned on moving to the Drobo and then decompressing it onto the device. Windows said this was going to take 340 minutes. Eeek almost 6 hours. Ok, it's a lot of data and Drobo is only a USB connection. At least is was just crossing over the motherboard of the desktop and not the network.

About 2 hours into the transfer Drobo started acting funny. About every ten minutes, the Drobo Dashboard started blinking that "I am protecting your data" and the lights on drobo flashed back and forth between red and green. It would go through it's data protection sequence for about 8 minutes and everything would be back to normal. It did this three times, then told me that drive three had failed. At this point drobo says it cannot protect me against a further drive failure and goes into a rebuilding cycle to distribute the data over the two remaining drives. This took about 22 hours.

Ok, I'm thinking that this must be a bad batch of drives. I went to Drobospace and did some research and found that Drobo failing drives is not unusual. This led me to take the bad drive out and install it in my another desktop with a free SATA connection. Sure enough, Windows saw the drive and was able to partition and format it. I was able to replicate this again in an external enclosure. So now I have a good drive, but Drobo will not see it.

This left me with an overall bad feeling about the Drobo. The bad part about this is that Global (I got help from them later) only allows exchanges for DEFECTIVE items. Well the drive is not defective, it works fine. Drobo just cannot use it. So out 120 bucks plus not feeling too comfortable about the Drobo unit.

On Monday, as suggested by one of the forum mods on Drobospace, I called Drobo tech support. I have to say that it was very nice that I could get on the phone with them in about 15 minutes. I was not impressed with the guy I ended up talking with on that call. He gave me an email address and told me to send me the diagnostics report. Now, the Drobo Dashboard does not have a report link. I told the tech this and it took him 5 minutes to figure out that you have to access this from the Windows system tray. I should have thought of it myself and was very disappointed that the guy Drobo puts on the phone doesn't know his hardware.

I was planning on using this unit too store my business data. As a photographer, my digital files are my life. This experience left me cold enough about the unit that I called Global Computer to see about sending it back. After some initial run around, I got in touch with Todd who worked pretty well with me. He was able to order a product for me that was not on Global's website, and let me return all of the drives and replace them with Seagate Barracuda 500GB drives. In a world of everything online, it was nice talking to someone who knew their product and was able to access products not readily available to the public. Todd is at (888) 445-2725 ext. 1590 and I highly recommend talking to him if you are going to order something.

Anyway, now I had a Promise Technology NS4300N and four 500GB drives for basically the same prices as the Drobo with drives.

For the home user the Drobo may be ok, but I would go with one of the readily available, proven, NAS products.

I will post more on the promise tomorrow.

New Tools

As shown in the earlier post, here is a picture of my new Data Robot or DROBO.

It is basically a raid (not really) based external USB storage unit. I had been looking for some sort of spanned storage solution for a while in the 2TB range and this seems to fit the bill.

I ordered it with 4 x 500GB WD CAVIAR 16MB SATA DRIVES. Installation was simple as pie. It took more time to open the packaging than doing the actualy install. Basically plug all of your drives into the Drobo, connect the power and USB cable and you are done. It shows up as a drive in Windows Explorer. At this point you can install the Drobo Dashboard which gives you some capacity measurements and fancy graphs. I don't think this is required.

I had looked at several NAS units. Buffalo Livestation 2TB and the Lacie 2 TB NAS. I liked the idea of plugging them into the router. I did not like that, it seemed to me, the way you upgraded capacity. With DROBO, I can just HOT swap drives to add additional storage. Without having to actively rebuild the array. That was not the case with the others.

So this seems to work for me for now. The only problem I have is that one of my four drives was DOA, so that is going back to vendor for a replacement.

Latitude D830

This was the other item that arrived at the household today. I got this using my NAPP membership discount. It's spec'd with 1.8 Intel Duel Core 800 MHZ FSB 2 GB RAM 80GB 7200 RPM drive 128 MB video card and the other associated stuff that comes with a laptop.

I went with the Dell basically for price and features. I like a trackpoint, so that means either a Thinkpad or a Dell. I also specifically wanted discrete video. 128 MB is not huge, but it's 128 MB more than I have now. The other thing I wanted was Windows XP, which is getting harder and harder to find these days. Vista still has too much growing to do before I would move my photo apps onto that type of build. Between the video, dual core, and the extra RAM it should run most of my photo aps just fine.

The main reason I went with Dell though was price With my discount I got about $550 off the spec price. That and I could lease it for business through Dell Buisness Leasing (direct write off for me) and here is my new tool.

So now I will be spending the next few days doing installs and migrating data.

Coming Soon

2007 Toyota Yaris HB

Pictures from my new car. The bottom shot is the fuel guage showing the mileage after 1/8 of a tank of gas. I got 39.82 MPG on this tank.. Yippee!

Coffee Cup Charlotte

The Coffee Cup is a meat and three located just outside of downtown Charlotte. They have been a landmark in their current location since 1946.
This is during the time period where white patrons ate inside the restaurant and black patrons had to eat outside.

That changed in the 1950s when Myrtle Heath, a black women, purchased the restaurant from its white owners. The Coffee Cup became one of the first restaurants in the south that allowed black patrons to eat inside with the white patrons.

The reason I am babbling about this is that Beazer Homes, the owners of the property, want to tear down the Coffee Cup and turn it into a condo development.

The Coffee Cup is a landmark in Charlotte, with 60 years of history in this city. The owners are trying to get the building designated a historic landmark by Charlotte Historic Landmarks commmision to save the structure. I am actually surprised it was not already designated as a historic building.

The vote for the designation has been set for November 13th. However, the Beazer Boobs, don't want to wait. They have basically sent the Coffee Cup an eviction notice to shut them down and shut them up. More information here.

I personally think the building should be saved. I think any developer could easily incorporate the place into any design they might have in mind. What a selling point to have a thriving eatery in your neighborhood.

I also think that anyone considering purchasing a new home should call Beazer(770) 481-7830) and say that they would not buy from a builder that destroys valuable history.

My two cents

Paxil Back

Found this after Yahoo put something up about Weird Al. Pretty funny.

Paxil Back Video

What the Duck

I think every working photographer should check out this cartoon by Aaron Johnson.

Marlene and I almost split a gut laughing over the one from August 14th.

In Memory of 9/11

Baby Portraits

This is from a set of portraits taken a few months ago. It's always nice to see clients enjoying my images.

Photography Workshop

I am currently in Kansas City, MO for a school photography workshop. These are images from the class and from the shoot out we had this evening.

Today's My Birthday

Today I am, well let's just say that I am a step closer to 40 and leave it that. Marlene made me a cheesecake so all and all it's been a good day.

Sean on his birthday.

Support Michael Yon

As a photographer with a fairly large library of images online, I am frequently battling copyright infringement issues. Mostly from Myspace users, but occationally I find people using images without licensing on their websites. www.Charlotte-home.com comes to mind as a commercial group that used my images without copyright.

So I saw an article about Michael Yon's Fight with HFM and I had to put a link up here to support it.

Please avoid these magazines : American Photo, Boating, Car and Driver, Cycle World, ELLE, ELLE Decor, ELLEgirl, Flying, For Me, Home, Metropolitan Home, Popular Photography & Imaging, Premiere, Road & Track, Road & Track Road Gear, Road & Track Speed, Sound & Vision, Woman’s Day and Woman’s Day Special Interest Publications

And check out how you can do your part.

New Camera(s)

I started into photography when I was 11 when my mom enrolled me in a summer class at a local art school. We started out with homemade oatmeal pinhole cameras and moved up to manual 35 mm black and white.

I moved to Copenhagen in 2001 and knew I would be travelling quite a bit around the world. At the time digital cameras were coming onto the market and I picked up an 1.3MP Olympus 460UZ. It was a good camera which I took to something like 8 or 10 countries. I have not shot a film camera since that time.

When Marlene and I were in Vancouver, we took a side trip to Fort Langley. This is a cute little town about an hour east of Vancouver. We never saw the fort, but we did go through a few antique shops. In one of them I ran across a beautifully mainted Rodenstock Folding Camera.

The Rodenstock Folding camera is a 1930s area manual camera in a 127 film format. I looked it over, worked the shutter, aperture, and film back. It looked really neat and I think it will still record light onto to film. So what the heck I picked it up. It was only $45 US and I figure I can get that back in Art images from it.

When I originally picked up the camera I thought it would take 120 film. I took it to one of the film places in Vancouver who also thought it took 120. However, they did not sell the film. They sent to me to Beau Photo at 6th and Granville. Neat place with good people. I picked up a few rolls of Kodak Tmax 120 BW. I also noted that they had some brand new Holga 120Ns in boxes. The Holga is a Medium Format point and shoot. I had seen one of these in an article at Luminous Landscape. So I picked up one of those as well. I think his article got me looking for something different. However, I went the film direction.

So now I have two film cameras. The Holga has almost no settings to use. You just need to make sure you have some pretty good light. The Rodenstock can be fully managed.

I have two rolls of film from these cameras going to processing today.

Here is a picture of the lens mechanism on the Rodenstock Folding Camera.

New Project

I have been having trouble with Canaca for the last few weeks. I have two websites up for renewal in the next 30 days, so this has presented a good opportunity to move those websites to a new host.

When I had started my photography website, I had originally looked at using Dreamhost because Jason liked it so much. I could not use it at the time because they did not support the Zend Optimizer and this is used by my lightbox software.

Jason informed me several months ago that Dreamhost was now supporting the optimizer. So after about a month of trying to get Canaca to get their acts togehter I have finally decided to move to Dreamhost.

I have three tarballs for my old sites and I am sure that I will be spending most of the week trying to get everything migrated. My new project so to speak. Any volunteers to help with this stuff? HEHE

New Mac Items

I saw this on Jason's blog and was going to write a comment. Then I realized my comment was becoming a book.

To be fair, I think Macs are cute, sleek, cool, whatever. They fit a specific need for some users. The biggest drawback, in my opinion, is that they are too expensive for what you receive with your purchase.

Back to the new entries in the Mac world.

1) Until it can natively run all of the Windows based apps I already own then the difference in price is moot. The one thing that caught my eye as a photographer was Apple's Aperture. It looked to be the end and be all for the photography industry and could have been the ONE reason I switched. I could get everything done on one platform with only a $2500 (Macbook Pro/Aperture) investment in hardware and software vs. a $4000 (Mac book pro/Photoshop CS 2/Capture One Pro/Office, etc) investment. Then we found out, as a surprise to most of us, Aperture doesn't manage color profiles well. Mac has always been a dominate force in the graphic industry because they were the first to integrate management into their platforms. Now they release Aperture with bugs. Adobe may have smartened up with Lightroom. We will see when the final versions come out.

Back to the original bit about the Mini. I seriously considered getting a Mini for Marlene last year. They were cute and the price point at $499 was VERY attractive at first. However, and typical with every time I look at Apple, when you start adding extras that $499 price is way out the window. I felt like I was on a bait and switch car lot. $499 at the time got you an cute underpowered box. Then you have to add a keyboard ($70), a mouse ($40), and a screen (gazillion dollars. However, let's say you find a cheap LCD for it at around $250. All of the sudden you are $1000 for, albeit cute, underpowered PC. For a $399(
From Dell website today) I can a get a 2.53 GHZ Celeron. Tower with 512GB of ram and a nice LCD monitor. So I don't think the $599 will make that much of a difference to the average user. I think if you already own larger Mac then the Mini might be a cute addition. If you are in the PC world then go look at any of the thousands of PC deals out right now.

2) I am surprised they didn't do it earlier. However, I would never own one even if I had an Ipod. You might as well have stamped "Steal ME" on the side with the IPOD logo. All it does is advertised that you have a mutli-hundred dollar gadget to steal

3) HUH? I think Mac has some of the most aesthetically looking products on the market. How did there engineers come up with the idea of mounting the thing on the top? Heck, make it black and have it look like the monolith from 2001 a Space Odyssey.

Also, I would buy BOSE equipment any day over something put out by a computer manufacturer.

Dice Game

We play this dice game that Marlene and her parents played. You can win the game in one role if you roll five one's. Well, sure enough, Marlene rolled those tonight .So here is a picture of Marlene's winning roll.

Super Bowl Ads

Well Super Bowl XL is finally over. It was a pretty decent game as far as Super
Bowls go. I think the best game so far during the playoff season was the Indy/Pitt game, but at least this Bowl was not a blowout in the first half.

Along with the game, a lot people watch the Super Bowl to see new cutting edge advertising. In the past there have been quite a few water cooler talks about the Super Bowl TV spots. In 2005 we had the Pepsi P-Diddy ad and in 2004 there was the the Budweiser Sleigh Ride. And I think we all remember the hype when Apple was the first advertiser to spend $1million for an Ad slot.

Last year my favorite advertisement, and the one that generated the most controversy, was the GoDaddy.com ads. GoDaddy is my domain registrar and it was neat seeing a dot com advertising on the big game with a pretty darn funny spot. They had one this year that was cute and they document the process of 14 revisions to get it through the ABC censors on their website. It's funny because I find the Pepsi ad in the same genre as the GoDaddy ad, but I bet they didn't go through half the battle GoDaddy did to get on the air

However, this year I found the ads pretty much dull. The Hummer ad was probably the worst one. Followed by a close second by the American Home Health advertisement. It seems that the Janet Jackson stunt from a few years ago is going to have us wallowing in mediocre Super Bowl advertisements for the next few years.

I am Dallas Cowboy fan. Obviously, since my team is not the Super Bowl, I need something to draw me to the gig. It used to be the advertising because, unless your team is in the game, the last 10 or so bowls have been passing dull. The ads give the thing flavor for the people that don't have their teams in the game. It makes me wonder if it is going to be worth watching next years game if there isnt that sideshow in the ad arena.

While I am conservative financially, I am pretty much liberal on most other societal issues and it bothers me that we as Americans can be so sensitive to some issues. If you don't like it, change the channel, but don't ruin everyone else's enjoyment by censoring public television. Oh well off my high horse.

You can find a list of most of the Super Bowl advertising at IFilm. I found it a nice run through memory lane.

Intel Macs?

Intel based mac computers. What is the world coming to these days. Who knows maybe Windows for Mac next.:)

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Gots Lens?

I saw a link to this one from the DPR Forums. Talk about super lens envy. The lens technical data can be found here.

Badger Graphics Sales / Canon 24-105 F4L IS

All year I had been looking to add the Canon 24-70 2.8L to my lens line up. It is a good complement to my 70-200 F2.8l IS lens I had gotten in November 2003. I purchase most of my equipment from B&H Photo in New York. 9 times out of 10 they have the product I want at a price 20% cheaper than I can get it in Charlotte. Their shipping is excellent. I usually get my items with two days using UPS ground.

Canon threw me a curve ball this year. They released the 24-105 F4L IS in October. At the time it was about the same price as the 24-70, but it has IS and I LOVE the IS on my 70-200. So I debated it until two days before Christmas. Wolf Camera in Charlotte had the lens for the same retail price as BH so I picked it up. The total cost with Tax as $1343.00. Not a cheap investment. I usually never buy anything form Wolf. Their prices are normally ridiculous for camera equipment. Compare what they want for my 70-200 vs. B&H. It's not often I see a lens appreciate in value.

After two days I was not sure I would keep the lens. It just was not that impressive to me for amount of money. Well I took it on our Christmas vacation and grew to really enjoy the focal length of the lens. The IS worked well and it has that typical 'L' build quality. I enjoyed the lens, but still could not justify the price from Wolf so I took it back when we returned from vacation.

The day after returning the lens, I saw a forum on DPReview talking about it being on sale at Badger Graphic Sales for $1095.00. That is a steal for this lens. I had never heard of Badger and I thought I knew most all of the online retailers. Well I did some research and heard good things so I pulled the trigger that night. Got the lens overnighted to me on Wednesday. This was New Years Saturday so the second business day was Wednesday. So basically I saved $200.00 into my hand vs. the Wolf Price. The transaction went smoothly and the product was delivered as I expected.

For those of you looking at Camera Equipment it would be a good idea to create a bookmark to Badger Graphic Sales in your web browser.

The lens is fabulous. Now I just need to go out and shoot it.

It takes a thief

This is an update to an earlier post about searching the web for people using my images.

There is a realtor here in Charlotte that had been using my Moon Over Morehead street horizontal images on the front page of their web site. I contacted the owner of the business about it. He seemed to understand my concerns so I sent him an invoice on licensing information.

My image was still on the website yesterday and today it has been changed to another image. Ok, so I don't get the licensing fee. No bigger. However, I started looking at the image and realized it was not an image of Charlotte.

I checked the properties of the image and saw that it was an image of London. I did a google images search and what do you know the image is on the first page of search results for that image. The image is located the British Embassies' website in Zagreb Croatia. The image belongs to a quite talented freelance photographer name Damir Fabijanic from Croatia. This is one of his exhitbits.

This aggravates me to no end. The realtor in question is developing a multi-million dollar project in downtown Charlotte. Ok fine, I don't get the business, but dont go continually stealing from photographers.

The website is www charlotte-home dot com. .

What's funnier about this is that the site home page has "Committment, Intergrity, and Trust" as links. In my opinion, someone who blatantly steals images like. this website has, certainly does not exhibit trust or intergrity.

Of Interest

I search the web frequently for my name and images to see if my works pops up in places it shouldn't. Usuually I find people that have downloaded or hotlinked and image from my websites. I usually call the offending people and ask them to either license the image or remove it from their website.

Finding one which markets my work is a bonus. I have some photographs at the Morris Street Gallery in Blowing Rock, NC. I gather they did a press release so I also ended up with their listing on the newspaper website.

Pretty cool

Marlene's new doo

Marlene got a new haircut while I was at work today...:)

Tilly's Visit 1

I am sure Marlene will add more later. The girls are currently in Charleston, SC.

Studio 2

Here is the studio. I still have a lot of work to do in it, but it is taking shape. Photographs of some of the models I have worked with are available in the galleries.

This was shot before I started working with Heather below

Studio Space 1

I titled this post Studio Space 1 because there will have to be photographs of the space in studio space 2. However, I wanted people to know that I had finised my search and have rented a small space at he Hart Witzen Gallery in Charlotte's Noda Arts District.

This will allow me a place to work on more portraiture and figure studies. I would very interested in meeting models that are looking for "time for print" work.

Embroidery

I had wanted to do up some polo shirts for the upcoming art shows. I started out wanting a simple white polo with my logo. So I started Googling.

I found thousands of results for embroidery. All of them wanted 12 piece lots or more. I need a few shirts, but certainly not 12. I finally found two companies that offered small lots. The first was Embroid Me. They quoted me $233.00 for four white polo shirts with my logo. $99.95 of that was the setup fee for the artwork. That was a little steep for my budget so I kept hunting.

I found a place called Little Creek Embroidery in Graham, NC. They offered a good selection of products with a VERY reasonable artwork charge of $25.00. The cost per piece was the price on their website plus $5.00 for the stitching. Not a bad deal since they had polo shirts for $11.84. At that price I may even just buy my polo shirts from them sans stitching. So I placed a request for a quote for 2 white and 2 gray short sleeved polos. This was on April 5th. I got the delivered price back of $80.25. Well at that price I might as well buy more.

I ended up ordering the original four shirts, plus 4 more in long sleeve, 4 caps and 4 tote bags. That got me over their 12 discount line and qualified me for a 20% discount. I could not have been happier. It ended up costing me $233ish for all 16 pieces. I received the order on April 18th which was two days before I was expecting it to show up. They will definately see more of my business and I am certainly going to pass them around. Maybe the camera club might want some shirts.

What is even better about this is that I feel good about supporting a local state business with this order.

Little Creek Embroidery in Graham, NC is a great outfit for someone needing custom embroidery. I highly recommend their product. See picture below.

I also got new business cards this week. These were from Overnight Prints and they were better than expectations as well. $39.00 (50 with shipping) for $1000 color business cards.

48 Oz Steak

I had a business-training seminar in Miami, FL in March of 1995. The company decided to put us up at Don Shula's Hotel and Golf resort. On these trips they used to put together nice book which told you all the details of the trip and made suggestions of things to do on your off time.

One of the Items on the list was eating at Don Shula's Steak House. At the time, it was one of the top 10 steak houses in the US. This is a typical big steak type house like Ruth Kriss or Mortons. Everything is a la carte. This means your steak comes by itself with nothing else. One of the features they had was a 48 OZ Porterhouse steak. A person eating it got their name on a plaque on the wall of the restaurant. Well I ate one. I tell this story every few years when the subject of big steaks comes out. Sometimes I don't think people believe me when I tell the story.

Well now I have proof. In the wonders of today's technical age a search for Sean Rivinus will eventually take you a to a link at Don Shula's webpage where they have recorded all the names of the people who have succeeded in eating that monstrous steak.

It's nice to be vindicated to all of those doubters.

Art in the Park

I received my acceptance letter today for the 43rd Annual Art in the Park in Blowing Rock, NC. This is a juried art show with about 120 artists. Marlene and I checked it out last year while celebrating our anniversary. Unlike some of the other shows in the area, Art in the Park is only for artists. There are 120 artists in every kind of media you can imagine. When we went last year there were 5 photographers. They had beautiful work to show and I will have some good competition for sales. However, I did notice that their work is much different than mine. I am more into close-up pictures of things I like vs. all landscapes. It should make for an interesting year.

Oil Jar

Tonight we had hamburgers and french fries. After dinner I ran out to Coscto to pick up the test bed prints. This is what I saw on the counter when I got back home. At first I thought it might be for some weird HPT (Home Pregancy test). I mean it does look like pee in a jar and, well you know, we do plan on having children at some point. Of course it isn't pee in a jar. It is the leftover oil from the fries. Oh well better luck next time

Virginia Beach

I went to Virginia Beach the weekend of the 20th. I wanted to catch up with an old friend that I had not seen in two years. I need to get up there again sometime and catch up with Jason as well. We are thinking about maybe taking our vacation up towards the Philadelphia area so maybe that will work.

The pictures are posted here.

Art Gallery 2

I had written earlier that I was showing my photographs at a local art gallery called the "Nodo Artist Network." I finally sold a print on Thursday. Yippee!!

Test runs

You know I have a very loving wife. Saturday we went to a couple of music stores. I have an idea that I want to photographs of some musical instruments. Ideally I wanted a violin, a saxophone, and a french horn. I think my style of close in shots might be interesting to shoot with these pieces.

The first store was Sam Ash Music. They could rent me the violin and sax for $180 a piece for a year. Not quite what I had in mind. I only need it for a few days or so. However, they did have this really cool red acoustic guitar that was on sale for $65.00 So I left without the other pieces, but came home with a guitar. I figure that I only need to sell two pictures of it to pay for it..:). Marlene wants to hang it on one of the walls. Did I mention it's red?

The second place was called Music and More. They let me rent a sax for $39.00. It is actually a rent to own thing, but I can return it in three months with no extra charges. Now I only need one picture to cover this expense.

Neither place had the french horn. I am currently bidding on a used one on Ebay. I am also bidding on a starter 4/4 violin. They both cost about $10-15 a piece with shipping being about $30.00. So I hope to have those shortly.

I have added an album in the gallery page which contains my first test shots with the pieces. TI have decided to use this album as a "scratch pad" of images where people can comment and vote.

Gallery

I have installed a new Gallery program on the website. Check it out.

Happy Birthday Jason

This is in honor of Jason's birthday yesterday

rpm -i -replacepkgs ftp:/ftp.oldguy.com/oldjason.rpm

rpm -u where is Christie Brinkley.rpm

ssc christie brinkley.prm http://www.jasonscomputerroom.com/lockeddoor

echo on
chmod christie brinkley -777 remove top

finger (boy there are too many options with this one..:)

strings - christie remove strings

spank -jason (a couple of dozen times) and one to grown on

unzip http://www.jasonscomputerroom.com/lockeddoor/oldjason.rpm -with christie

echo off (this is a famliy site)

gzip -relaxed jason

rpm -u ftp:/ftp.jclark.org/newjason.rpm

date (jason got older yesterday)

Echo Happy Birthday Guy

Art Gallery

This is a combination of an update and a really weird. I know I had a post earlier about opening up an Ebay store. I am pretty sure it was in November because Jason linked to it. However, when I went to link to it for this post, I found that it no longer existed. Hmmm. odd.

The Ebay Store has done Ok. I have sold 17 images during the promo phase of the store. Now I wait to see if anyone will pay the full price for the pictures. Now is a good time to buy btw, because I will be changing the materials for the upcoming Blowing Rock "Art in the Park" series starting in May. That means the prices will go up.

Oh, I should probably mention that I am trying to do 6 shows next year at Art in The Park. They run on Saturdays May through October. I also plan on doing the Matthews, NC Art Fest next year.

Anyways, back to the store, I have decided to try another venue while I am waiting to ramp up to the Market and the other art shows. I have rented some gallery space in the "Noda Artist Network" building. I am displaying 4 framed images that sell for $150.00 a piece and I will be able to put up a print rack of matted images that will sell for $45.00 a piece. They take 20% off the top, but it is a more art-oriented audience. Noda is a new up and coming Arts district in Charlotte. It was featured in Time Magazine as one of the "10 Most Hip Places to Live." So we will see how this works out.

Ps. Jason. I'll have your Moon Over Charlotte picture in the mail soon. :)

Feedback

It's always nice to get feedback on my photographs

"Sean, I really love it. My sister is a coffee roaster and I wanted to get her something a little different for her shop, and your photograph was perfect - I have it in a teak frame and it looks great. I posted the link to the print in a roasting forum I belong to. It's just beautiful work and I'm sure it'll draw interest. Thank you again, and have a great holiday! Betty"

Here is a link to the item in my store. Betty got lucky by buying during my marketing phase.

Inkjet Big Macs?

Articles like this make you realize some people think WAY out of the box.

Updates

I guess I have been quite lazy recently in keeping this site updated. We have had a lot going on over the last month and it seems I can't seem to find the time to log it.

Let's see. I seem to be having the same problem Jason has with comment spam. I run this website and the Charlotte Camera Club website. Both of which have been deluded with spam over the last month. I also have some problems with my hosting provider - Canaca. They updated to a new control panel and in the process have screwed up some of the pathing so now Movable type cannot address the Image Magick plug ins to automatically create thumbnails. I'm still working on that problem and hopefully they will get it solved. Moving the camera club site is fairly easy because it is new, but this site is using over 1.2 gig of space already. Other website news: I appear to be a top search result for my Peta pictures. I am getting about 10,000 unique visits a month. Not bad for a personal website.

My photography business is growing quite well. I have my first on location commercial shoot tonight at the Rotary Club convention here in Charlotte. They are giving awards to about 60 members and I get to photograph the president handing the awards to each member. These are members that donated more than $10,000 to charities over the last year, so it should be a good networking opportunity. It's going to be interesting. I have to take 2 shots for each group in about 1 hour. OUCH! However, it allowed me to purchase some extra goodies. The guy I am doing this for is a member of Rotary. He also happens to be a CPA and it looks like I will be able to write off most of the gear this year. :) Good thing. Next year I hope to be in the position to start marketing for weddings.

My full time job is still busy. This time of year is always a pain for the trucking business because all of the retailers are stocking for Christmas. Our volume has not slowed down at all during the year and no we are trying to do twice as much work with the same amount of trucks. It amazes me how hard it is to find quality drivers in today's times. My guys make anywhere from 40-50 a year and I still can find enough good ones to put in the trucks.

I really need to take some time to get the camera equipment side of the site updated. I have acquired some real cool new gadgets over the last few months and I should be writing about them. The Canon 10D is a great camera and with the 20d release it has really been dropping in price.

The Ren Fest pictures are now updated in the gallery. The pictures are both mine and Marlene's. We have free tickets so we are planning on going back this weekend to actually enjoy the show. The last time was work. Of course, I am sure there will be a camera in attendance this weekend.

That is all for now.

Tilly's Visit 2

I convinced the girls to do some poses for me. This way I could play with a new softbox I had acquired. More of her visit can be found here

Update

I guess we have been pretty lax keeping anything updated on the website.

I finally got around to posting the pictures last week from the Bele Chere Arts Festival in Asheville, NC. This is one of the bigger arts fairs around the area and I wanted to see how other Photographers were marketing their work. I hope to be able to do fairs like this one next year.
It was a fun event. It's a little long for a day trip to see 6 photographers, but I did get to ride in a helicopter for $15.00.

We did the farmers Market again this weekend. I had acquired a new display stand and started putting out some larger pictures. We had a good weekend. I sold the Gerbera Daisies, The black and white rose, the Charlotte shot with the Moon over it, and the crayons on the bottom left. I should have even more 8x12 images out next week.

In the last month, I also upgrade to the Canon EOS 10D and acquired a Alienbee B400 flash unit so I can start learning portrait photography. The 10D is quite a bit heavier than the Rebel. I think I will like it, but I do miss some of the button placements on the other camera. I really like the 9 frames burst in can do. That would have been nice to have at the Steeplechase earlier this year. I sold the Rebel to a gentlemen in Philadelphia for around 700 dollars. I had previously sold the kit lens for around 180 on ebay so it cost me basically $120 to own the camera for about 9 months. Pretty good rental rate.

That's all for now

SteepleChase Part 2

As you know we Marlene and I went out to Photograph the Queenscup Steeplechase last April. Basically our local camera club traded entrance fees for our photographs. Well here it is in July and I have 5 of 9 total pictures on the Southpark Magazine website and in their July issue.

My five are the First three in the left column numbers 3 and 4 in the right columns. The Queenscup owns the rights to the photographs, so I don't get captioning credit, but it it really neat to see my stuff in real print.

Marlene's New Toy

Marlene ponders the instruction book for her new sewing machine.

Sunday Pictures

Here are some pictures from today. Top left is a Magnlia from a tree near our apartment. Top right is the sunset today. Which lead me outside the house with the camera to shoot the Magnolia and the third picture (bottom left) which is Marlene. The bottom right shot is a Calla Lily I am working on for possible later sale.

Birthday July 9th

Here is a wishlist for people looking for items that would be of interest to me for my birthday. Marlene usually puts something out a year in advance. I thought a month might be better. I buy most of my photographic stuff from B&H Photo Video so gifts cards for there would probably be the best. Most of the stuff on the list are WISH items and I don't expect anyone to get them for my birthday. Happy Shopping. I also like books. Barnes and Noble gifts cards always go over well as well.

• Camera stuff
  • Lenses
    • Sigma 24-70 2.8 EX DF Zoom.  $409.00
    • Sigma 135-400 Zoom Telephoto $519.00
    • Sigma 20MM F 1.8 EX DG  $369.00
    • Sigma 180 2.8 Macro $739.00
    • Sigma 12-24 Wide Angle 669.00
  • Accessories
    • Canon Speedlite 550 EX $299.00
    • Sigma DG ST 500 $149.00
    • Stroboframe camera bracket  $119.95
    • Off Camera Shoe Cord (needed with bracket) $47.95
    • Sekonic Flash Meter $249.00
    • Radio Transmitter for Sekonic Flash Meter $25.00 (when purchased w/meter)
    • Tripod Ring Mount for 70-200 F4L $113.95
    • Pocket Wizard Transmitter and Receiver $349.00
    • Extension Tube set for Canon EOS $129.00
    • Tele-Converter for Canon EOS $79.95
    • Background Stand Kit $94.95
    • Backgrounds Various prices the above list kit can use paper and muslin
    • Cokin P Filter Kit $34.50 (requires 67 & 77 MM Adapter Rings)
    • Cokin P Filters Various prices Graduated ND, Circular Polarizing, Graduated Color, Sunset, Warming, etc
    • B800 Alien Bee Monolight Kit $279.00
    • Epson P2200 13x19 Printer 539.00 at Costco
    • Lexar 40X 512 MB Compact Flash Card $119.95
    • Lexar 40X 1 GB Compact Flash Card $239.95
    • Fletcher Match Mate 40 system Matt Cutter $176.00
    • Casio 4" Handheld TV. Used to proof pictures in the field $199.00

• Clothing

• Lands End Oxford Shirts 16.5 X 32 $19.95
• Lands End 200s Broadcloth 16.5 x 31 $115.00
• Any Dockers type khaki pants. 38 x 29
• Dress sock size 9
• Red necktie $35.00
• Dot Square Necktie Red $35.00

Posted by srivinus at 07:21 PM

Wall Art

This i a picture of three roses we framed and hung up on the wall above our sofa. They were show with the Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel and a Tamron SP90 2.8 lens. They have been enlarged to 20x30 and placed in wood poster frames.

Rose Picture

I just posted and image on the photoblog. I have been quite busy over the last six weeks and haven't done too much work on the blogs. I thought I would take some time to write a more proper entry.

The following image was one of two orange dozen roses I had picked up for Marlene. The one advantage Marlene has in my liking flower pictures is that she gets lots of them for the house.

I shot the picture with my Canon Eos Rebel 300D. Attached to the Canon is a Tamron SP90 2.8 lens. Tamron does not have the best lens reputation, but I have been extremly satisfied with the details this lens when I take pictures. The whole unit is mounted on a Bogen 3001Pro Tripod with a 3265G Joystick Ball Head with a quick release. I just picked up the tripod and head this weekend. What a joy! The Joystick is a handle you squeeze and the camera roatates with 360 degrees of motion. This is great for the types of shots I take. Lastly I am using a JTL 900 9' light stand with a cheap clip-light for lighting. It's simple, but it works. Here is a picture of the setup.

Here is the resulting picture. Notice the details in the petals of the flower. That is thanks to the F32 aperture setting on the Canon.

Macro Photography

This is a macro shot of a Zinnia taken from Marlene's container garden. It was shot at 1/500 f71 with a Canon Digital Rebel and a 90MM Tamron 2.8 SP lens. Some people have knocked Tamron lenses, but I love this one. Take the time to enlarge the picture and notice the details around the petals. I had never really noticed the tendrils coming off the petals before seeing the shot.

Voice Over Ip (VOIP) Vonage

A few months ago we signed up for Vonage-The telephone over broadband service. It has been pretty successful, so much so that I will be pulling the land lines out at the end of the month. We are currently saving about $45.00 er month with it and with the Bellsouth out we sould save another $24.00 per month. Of course that means we will be without phones if the cable service goes out, but we also have two cell phones.

One of the only advantages to having a land line is being able to use Dial up for internet access when the cable modem is down. I would loose this feature in the above setup. I can deal without the internet for $70.00 per month. It did bring up an interesting question. Could you use Vonage with it's dial tone with a dial up modem. I think you could. I just think the phrase "Dial up over VOIP" was neat.

Picture of Sean

A picture of Sean at the Queens's cup

Stuff

I just wanted to get something up on the website. The presentation for the camera club went well. They have asked me to register and setup their website www.charlottecameraclub.com I have the domain and server up and running. I am waiting on Canaca to install ImageMagick on the server so I can get Movable Type running. I think MT will be good for the club members. Most of the members are not the biggest computer users so MT will allow them an easy way to upload images and write stories.

The camera club has been invited to provide photographers for this years Queen's Cup Steeplechase race in Mineral Springs this year. We have been given press passes to get into the restricted areas and it should be quite bit of fun next weekend. I'll save some pictures to post here.

Busy Days

It seems everyone in the blogging world has been busy this last month. I have noticed a definate decline in posting and I am included in that decline.

Last month I posted that my company had bought another company here in Charlotte. I have been working non-stop in the office since March 15th. The merger has not gone well. We have found that most of the owner operators from Star Freight don't seem to want to actually work. We had expected to get 40 drivers from the buyout and so far have ended up with about 12. That number changes daily. I have been working 12-15 hour days since we combined the companies on March 29th. Marlene has been a real trooper. I have been geting home between 7-10 most nights and going straight to bed. My day normally starts with me waking up between 4-5am. Funny, a few years ago I used to always sleep until noon. I have become a morning person over the last few years.

Easter weekend has been the first weekend I have had ANY time to do anything but work. I feel like I should be doing something more constructive this weekend, but I really needed the break.

Tomorrow I am giving a presentation to the local camera club on how to set up a website. They don't have internet access where I am giving the speech so I ended up installing webserer software on my laptop along with a working version of Movable Type. I used the directions Jennifer had put up at www.fortysoemthing.ca. Thank you to Jennifer for such a good article. It doesn't work exactly like the MT on my webserver. I didn't have the patience to get ImageMagick installed, so I don't get the thumbnailing feature, but it should work ok for this meeting.

Weekend

The last weekend seemed to go by so quickly. We did not do anything that special. I picked up a boat load of flowers which will end up on the Photoblog here at some point. Some others are posted on the website http://www.rivinus.com/2004/march_20.htm

Marlene had some more driving lessons. She spent an hour and a half going in circles. She also made it out onto some residential streets.

This will be the last weekend for a while that I will have time to take pictures. The new work thing has me working the next two weekends, so I doubt I will be up for much other than sleep.

Reflector

I picked up a bounce reflector the other day. You can see a test shot with it in the camera stuff area.

TCW buys Star Freight

It became official on Thursday that the company I work for, Tennessee Commercial Warehouse (TCW), has purchased Star Freight of Charlotte. Star Freight is is a slightly smaller operation than TCW with operations in Atlanta, Charleston, Charlotte, and Savannah. Those operations will be combined with TCW in the coming weeks.

This buyout will almost double the book of business for TCW. It will triple the terminal size here in Charlotte. Which why we bought the 12 acre facility mentioned earlier. We have also bought a 17 acre facility in Atlanta. I am about to see my revenue jump from around 2.8 million per year to somewhere between 8-10 million per year. Not a bad piece of the pie for me. My office staff will increase to between 6-7 and we will be running a 24/7 operation starting the 29th.

One of reasons I left Maersk was that I was no longer managing people. This acquisition means that I will now have around 30 direct reports. So it would appear that my move was a good one.

Six Minute Man

Marlene said, "I'm impressed." this morning. That is always a good way to start the morning. You see it only took me six minutes this morning.

No we are not talking about that. We are talking about my being able to wake up, get showered and dressed in 6 minutes. I had never really noticed the actual time, but I do know that I am pretty fast in the morning. I think it goes back to living close to College and wanting to sleep as much as I could.

As a guy, the clothing selection is much easier. I usually wear brown shoes, dockers, and a polo shirt. That means I don't waste time on clothing selection. The shoes are probably where most women get stuck. I only wear one pair of shoes during the week. Shoe selection alone could take an hour for a woman. Dockers are also a godsend in the morning ritual. All of my shirts will go with my dockers. I make sure of this when I am buying the shirts.

The last thing that really helps a guy is that we don't have to spend any time on makeup. I think women have bamboozled themselves into this morning ritual. Women look better naturally than with makeup. Sure you might want it to accent some features when going out at night, but it should not be part of a daily thing. Luckily, Marlene does not wear that much make up, but I have known girls that can spend an hour messing with the stuff.

Moving Day

Big news for my work this weekend. We bought a 12 acre piece of land in Charlotte this week. This facilty has a 22 door LTL dock included so we will be moving into the cross-docking, LTL, and distribution business shortly. We have been moving towards this for several months and now it has finally happened. It become official that this was the move weekend on Wednesday. That gave me a few furious days to line up furniture, address changes, etc into place. We moved most of the office stuff on Friday night. The new furniture was set up this morning.

There is still quite a bit to do getting things settled, but the bulk of it had been completed. Here is a picture of the lower yard and some of the upper yard.

Camera Stuff

I got two new lens this week a Tokina 20-35 F2.8 ATX 234 Pro and a Tamron 90 2.8 Macro SP. Pictures are all over the website from the Southeastern Home and Garden Living show and in my photography blog

Morning Drive

I went driving around Charlotte this morning doing my husbandly duty of picking up the Sunday paper. I am probably the only hubby in the world that turns this 10 minute task into a 1 and a half hour drive around town.

The roads were still not the best in Charlotte. There are quite a few patches where the melted snow from last night refroze this morning. I started off slipping on my porch and spilling my coffee. Not a good start to the Sunday drive. Here a few things that caught my eye.

Car stuck in the snow	Do they check to see if the keys fit the handcuffs?
Atkins self-storage?

Nature's Best

The local camera club is having us submit images for a contest for Nature's Best You can see my entries here.

Planning

I caught this at the Colonel's website.

I work in the tranportation industry. Everyday I go through what he is talking about. People not planning and making it my "Hot load" My company delivers domestic and international intermodal containers to points in the Southeast. The international containers are usually coming from Asia with a 30 day transit time. You would think that someone would have had ample time to figure out how to deliver those 50 cent widgets to Walmart on time But NO!. We usually get the call 1-4 hours before they want delivery. Their poor planning is now my extra work. It is amazing how much appears to be like the Colonel's IT industry.

Macro

I have taken a few more macro shots which have been posted here and here. These are part of a set of business objects pictures I am working on for my stock photography site.

PETA Protest

PETA? People for Eating Tasty Animals staged a rally today in downtown Charlotte. I was heading to get some subs from Harris Teeter. You saw a picture of one yesterday in my photoblog. The local radio station had a thing on saying Peta had a woman that was going to be protesting Nude at Trade and Tryon streets in downtown Charlotte. I happened to have my camera with me today and what better photo op can you get than a nude woman in the middle of downtown. So I grabbed a parking space and took a picture.

More pictures can be found on my Peta page at in the Photoalbums section

U.S. Foodmakers Blame Wal-Mart for Stunted Prices

From an AP article on Yahoo.

Americans may have noticed that their grocery bills have remained fairly stable, but it may surprise supermarket shoppers to learn that they have retail giant Wal-Mart to thank for keeping a lid on prices.

Stable prices are supposed to be bad?

Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart is the world's largest company by revenue and a dominant player in the U.S grocery business. The massive buying-power of the company's Supercenters, a retail format more than twice as large as its regular discount stores, means Wal-Mart can often buy and sell goods more cheaply than competitors.

Which means that I, Joe consumer, can buy them more cheaply.

Fruit and vegetable producer Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc., for instance, signs contracts with Wal-Mart and others before it knows how crop harvests for the year will turn out.

This year, the Coral Gables, Florida, company has enjoyed wider profit margins on tomatoes as production recovered.

Note Del Monte isn't talking about reducing prices when things are going their way.

Fresh Del Monte is not the only U.S. food company that has been forced to swallow rising costs.

Find a way to become more efficient so your pricing matches your costs structure.

Walmart is like any other business in this country. They try to get the cheapest prices on products from their suppliers. They do this with the hope of being able to resell those products at a profit. Does this mean that Walmart should be punished for having a good business model? Another way to put it; should we blame Walmart that we can't gouge customers with higher prices? I don't think so.

New Beetle Headlights

. I really enjoy my 2002 Beetle GLS. I do not love the way VW has handled the headlight replacements. The headlight on most cars is a Halogen 9001 which can easily replaced. Not so on the beetle. First you have to remove the entire headlight assembly. I found a good link on the web describing the process from New Beetle.org It took about 45 minutes. 30 of which was figuring how to get the thing realigned to go back into the bug. Oh well it's done.

Macro Photography

I found this site through Daily Dose of Imagery. The author had done some "Super Macro" photography of some insects. He is using a method where two camera lenses are mounted together front to front. He found out about doing this from this site.

I think some of my pictures are good, but they are nothing compared to these shots.
Plonsky Photography - Biography

Happy Valentines Day

VOIP

I read the following article on the Colonel's page.

My first experience with broadband was a cable modem from Cox Cable in Memphis, TN January of 2000. I was extremly impressed. I think I was the only person in the building that had one so my download speeds did not suffer the backlog some other cable users had described.

I was looking for a different apartment at the end of 2000. Memphis was going through a warehouse renevating boom and I found a nice studio loft in an old factory that would have been available in the first part of 2001. The neat thing about it was Cox was using the buliding as a testing site for their "Telephony" services. The building was wired for broadband cable, which was going to deliver Voice of IP and movies on demand. I was transferred to Denmark so never ended up trying the services.

I agree that the first company to get it all done for 85-100 per month will be a huge winner. I currently pay 90 for my cable/internet, 60 for two cells, 25 for phone, and about 60 a month in long distances. Vonage is a close option and will be looking into them now that they offer Canada in their service

Photography Blog

I am working on a Photography Blog. Comments are welcome

Maps

I found this while surfing for information about adding a photo gallery into movable type. I found a link to generate this map here

This is a map of all of the countries (in red) I have visited on my travels. I wish I could have had this when seanindenmark.com was up.

You can make your own at World66.com

Camera

I have been reading from Reid’s blog and he and Jordan are discussing point and shoot vs. digital cameras.

I got into photography in April of 2001 when I was transferred overseas. That job took me to 26 countries over the course of 18 months. Most of my friends and family would never be able to see as much of the world as I was seeing. This led me to getting a digital camera and creating a webpage.

My first camera was a 1.3 mega-pixel (MP) Olympus D-460Z. It was a great camera for the amateur shooter. This camera was used on 10 trips throughout the world. The pictures were for the most part outstanding. Usually any problems were with the photographer. Since the D-460, I have owned 5 other cameras; Olympus 2.1 MP C2100UZ, Canon 2.1 MP Digital Elph, C-40 (US D-40) 4M, Canon SD100 3.3mp, and now the Canon EOS 300D (Digital Rebel.).

I bought the 2100 to replace the 460. I wanted a bigger through the lens (TTL) viewfinder camera. I also wanted the extra lens length afforded by the optically stabilized 10x zoom lens. This camera took great pictures, but was HUGE compared the 460. Some of the countries I visited were not the best place to be lugging a 500 dollar camera. I remember in Russia hiding the camera under my overcoat. So in March I moved into a smaller camera-my first Canon Digital Elph.

The Digital Elph took good pictures. I think the Olympus point and shoots have slightly better pictures quality. The elph is a great tiny camera about the size of a pack of smokes. This allows you to sneak it into places the 2100 could not go. I took the Elph to three countries. I ended up selling it as a package deal to a friend of mine along with my laptop. I had wanted to upgrade my current laptop and the combination made a good deal for my friend.

I was back to the 2100. It did not take long to realize that I did not like lugging it around. So I picked up a small 4MP Olympus C-40 in Malaysia.

I have since sold the Olympus and purchased two new cameras. The first was another Elph for taking to parties and such. The second was the Rebel. I wanted something that I could continually expand. The ability to change the lenses should allow me to upgrade as needed. Images from each camera can be found here.

I think the Reid at Photodude and Jordan make good points. Sometimes you want the better image enlargement capabilities of a DSLR and the portability of a point and shoot is great for cameo pictures. I am lucky in that I have both.

Happy Birthday

Today is Jason's birthday. I orignally met Jason when we were both in school at Old Dominion University in the Spring of 1992. We had been in a Pascal programming class the previous fall. I noticed that we were both in the same C programming class that spring and said Hi.

A lot has changed since using the Sun Sparc stations in the labs to locate "non youth images" and hanging out at the local Orion BBS functions. We have both moved from our hometowns. We have both grown up and been successful in our careers. We have both gotten married-He was the best man at my wedding. Jason now has a wife, two kids, and something like 15 computers. Would you believe that at one point he owned a Micro-vax?

His favorite new toy is his powerbook. Well at least I think it is his favorite. I have been ragging on him about his powerbook (powerbrick) for a few months now. For his birthday, I am actually going to post a picture of his Apple dream unit.

Computer:
Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5
1GHz frontside bus/processor
512K L2 cache/processor
512MB DDR400 128-bit SDRAM
Expandable to 8GB SDRAM
160GB Serial ATA
SuperDrive
Three PCI-X Slots
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
64MB DDR video memory
56K internal mode

Display
23" diagonal viewable image size
1920 x 1200 optimal resolution
16.7 million colors
19.2 x 24.2 x7.3-11.1 inches
25.3 pounds
Two USB ports
Apple Display Connect

Happy Birthday Jason. I hope someone got you this toy this year.

Charlotte Sunrise

It's not the greatest image, but I thought the colors for this morning's sunrise were outstanding.

TP Equation

We have a person that comes in and cleans my office. The quote for the cleaning includes supplies such as toilet paper. During my afternoon sabbatical, I started to wonder, “How does one quote a contract for the supply of toilet paper (TP). “

I figured that finding the answer to this might make for an interesting afternoon google. I had visions of someone calculating DPD (Dumps per day) or PPD (Paper per dump) to figure out how many rolls of paper to supply an office. This whole story would make a humorous, if slightly tasteless, blog entry.

Google turned up several results that had combined paper usage. I found out that toilet paper seems to be quite the issue for the environmental lobby. However, the most interesting one I found was here. This guy came up with an equation that you can use to calculate enough TP to stockpile for life.

(number of days life expectrancy/71.48)= rolls to stockpile/person

I only need to calculate a year so I used 365 for the number of days. Based on this formula and the 20 people in my office, we should need 102.126 roles of TP for the year or about 51 dollars worth of TP.

I feel so much more relieved now that I have worked it out.

Weather

We had some ice storms last night and today. I ended up closing the office and spending the day working from home. Working at home does not really mean much when all of my drivers are off. I did cheat a little bit and got the links worked out on the website. I created some buttons in Fireworks that somewhat match the ones that Front Page generates for navigation. I have changed the title at the top of this blog into the link back to the main website. It works ok for now.

We, well ok Marlene made, bread today with our breadmaker. I had gotten the breadmaker before I went to live in Denmark. It stayed at my parents house unused for most of the 20 months I was overseas. It makes nice 2 lb long loaves of bread vs. the little mini-loaves of other bread makers. Marlene also made a pie.

The following picture was made with a program called XnView. This program is an easy program for reading Canon Raw files if you don't want to do any exposure changes. It has a feature to make a contact sheet with file descriptions. This way I can display one picture instead of uploading 8 or 10.

Sales

Well I made a sale yesterday to a company out of New York called BookBuilders LLC. The purchased a copy of a picture of Sweet Potato Pie" for a run in a 4th grade textbook called "Uniquely Carollina.


I got the lead for this sale from http://www.photoconnect.net. I have two galleries posted on their website. They had a request from a a reaserch assistant for pictures of North Carolina. Photoconnect is in the UK, so they forwarded the request to me on Sunday morning. They were looking for several pictures of things native to North Carolina. The pie was the only one I could do very quickly. I was able to shoot the pictures on Sunday morning and post them on my photography website http://www.photography.rivinus.com/gallery/bookbinder.htm. They reviewed them Sunday/Monday and I got a request for the limited rights to the picture on Tuesday. They ended up ordering 2632 for $100.


The only thing I don't like is that I have to invoice them in New York. I am interested to see if they actually pay it.

Go Carolina

CONGRATULATIONS CAROLINA PANTHERS

CAR 14


PHL 3

Sunday Night

The Eagles/Panther's game is on and I am online updating the website. I guess you get a little out of football after living away from it for a few years. The 3rd project is updated on the website. You can follow this URL http://www.rivinus.com/camerastuff/project_3.htm


I also worked this weekend on some rose macro photography http://www.photography.rivinus.com/gallery/things.htm


Lastly, I may have made a sale today. More on that latter this week.

Sunday comics

I have a couple of things to rant about today.


The first is about the Sunday Comics. As Marlene said earlier, I go out every Sunday and pick up the Charlotte Observer. For the most part I dislike the Observer as it is a useless paper, but I do love the Sunday comics. Someone at the Observer seems to have figured out that quite a few of us just read the comics and has started to invade my comic reading with advertisements! These adverts are on the front and back pages of the comics. They half-fold over each section so I can only read part of the front page comics while enjoying a sabatical in my porcelain office. For months now I have been noting the adverts and cutting them out of the paper. I want to make sure that I NEVER buy products from any of these co