Hiking in Cartersville

We did a 4.5 mile hike today at Pine Mountain in Cartersville. It was nice to get out with our friends and the dogs, and I also played with the new 40D. We never knew that this mountain existed and its a great spot to get some hiking in about 20 mins from the house. Elevation went from 800ft to about 2k over 2 miles. Whew!

I do dig the new camera. The picture quality isn't that much better then the 350d, but the whole package is greatly improved. The "feel" in my hand is a lot nicer, and the shutter on it rocks. It just sounds a lot more solid. I had to throttle back the drive setting, as leaving the shutter button pressed for a split second too long results in 3-4 more pictures because of the fast fps the camera is capable of. The 3" screen also rules. Reviewing shots is a good bit easier then the 1.5" screen I got used to on the 350D. I'm looking forward to getting out and shooting more with the new toy.

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V-Day Roses

So I got Cathy some roses for V day. Since I got the new camera, and the purple roses were unusual I snapped a couple of pictures. Don't think I'm going with simple red roses anymore, as the flower shop had a ton of other choices. We'll see what combo I come up with next time :)

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Canon 40D!

So I pulled the trigger on my upgrade. I've used the 350D for over 2 years now. I'm an "ok" amateur and never thought I would need an upgrade. I went the $$$ glass route, as suggested by many peers smarter then I, and it was well worth it. I got some great shots out of my 350D and 70-200L,24-105Ls. Recently, I've gotten the gear bug though, and with the used 40Ds coming down so much in price, I finally pulled the trigger.

Here are my impressions of 40D over the 350D for anyone else considering such a move

• The "feel" of the camera is much better, yet smaller then my 350D + grip combo. The 350 w/o the grip is too small for my hands, but the 40D fits just perfectly.
• The grip, the buttons, the locations, are just "right on" with this body, compared to being cramped in the 350D. I've seen people post that the 350D was a toy compared to the XXD series, and I kinda see what they are saying now.
• The "click" of shutter sounds better. The 350D has more of a slap, where the motorized up and down of the 40D sounds a lot beefier.Its wierd, but I really like the sound of the 40D shutter.
• In good light with 100 ISO, I can't really tell a difference between two "internet sized" shots. At full zoom, you can see a slight detail difference, but there isn't a huge wow factor in this situation
• In low light, the difference really kicks in. 1600ISO on the 40D is about equal to 400ISO on the 350D. Its THAT much of a difference. I took a well exposed shot at 1600ISO and it looks excellent. Wow!
• 6.5fps = Wow. That part is NOT going to suck for taking 1/80th pans of race cars. The keeper ratio was low with the 350D when trying for such low shutter speeds. With the 6.5fps, I'll be able to nail a 4-5 shot combo of each car, where with the 350D i could get ~2 shots of "in frame" in.
• Haven't noticed a huge difference in AF yet, but I haven't done any AI Servo work with race cars yet. The 40D seems to catch a little faster then I was used to, but its not that much. Then again, most of those were in great light, so the 350D didn't have much trouble and my amateur self never found the AF lacking with my 350D as I use the center point 99% of the time.

Not saying the 350D is bad. Its certainly a GREAT body, and at current prices ($350 used) its a KILLER deal for someone trying to get into DSLRs. Its just that the 40D really is a great step up and with the improved controls/format/performance allows you to enjoy photography more. I'm sure liking mine, and glad I pulled the trigger finally..

We're going for a hike this afternoon, so I'll take it with me and take some test shot. Sweet!

Car in the shop and PBR

So my race car is in the shop. Since I'm the DIY type, it doesn't happen that often, but after the ARRC wreck, I decided to have the car checked out by Trever, who is the one that built it. I looked it over at the house and it doesn't actually look too bad. The only thing out alignment wise was the right front camber and toe. Looks like the upright got bent. The other 3 wheels where right in sync with each other and not even more a smidgen. The bottom subframe, which was 1/16" away from the header looks to have maybe moved in the accident, hit the header slightly cracking it, and then moved back. Since thats a $$$ custom header, figured, lets have it fixed by folks that know more then I do.

Once Trever gives the car a thumbs up, I'll be taking it over to the body shop to have the rear quarter panel dents touched up and sprayed over with red paint. I might take it home inbetween and see how much of the body work I can touch up to save money. We'll see. Since I need new fenders and a new front bumper cover, I decided to go with a slightly different paint scheme for next season. I'm going to cover the hood and fenders with carbon fiber look vinyl, so I don't have to paint. And then extend that vinyl into the doors with some kind of design. The front bumper will stay "factory black" as its just easier that way.

Also yesterday was about the nicest day in the last month or so here, so we went out to the dog park with a couple of our friends and out for some beers and pizza. They had $5 PBR pitchers which I couldn't pass up :) I was actually pleasantly surprised at the taste of PBR being sober, as I usually reserve PBR for the end of the night once I don't care about what I'm drinking.

Cheap Digital Camber Gauge

A few years ago I used someone's "Smart Camber" digital camber gauge. It was awesome! You could zero it on the ground and measure your camber on uneven ground with 0.1 accuracy. I was going to get my own, but the $250 street price kind of discouraged me. Being the DIY type, I decided to make my own.

Take:

• (1) Digital Level from Sears with 0.1 accuracy which can be found on sale for $35
• (1) 20in long, 1" wide, 1/8" thick piece of steel from Home Depot Racing
• (2) 1" long 1/4" thick metal spacers from HDR
• (2) Allen head 1.5" bolts
• (2) Nuts and washers

Drill a hole on one end of the sheetmetal, then 3 holes for 15, 16 and 17" wheels on the other end. Put in the bolts into the spacers, through the sheetmetal and throw a washer/nut on the other end. The pictures at the end of the post show what I'm talking about. The level attaches to the sheetmetal and is very sturdy as it has a nice big magnet in it.

To do an alignment, just set the gauge on the ground in front of your tire and level out to 0 with the "zero" button. Then place against your wheel and do a tiny bit of math. 88 degrees on the gauge = -2 degrees camber. Easy, accurate to 0.1, and under $40 including all materials. It's been working great the last season and between this, and stringing up the car for toe, I can do pro alignments in the garage or the pits whenever I please. After the lift, the Jeep went to the shop for an alignment, so I got to verify the accuracy of the gauge and it matched their Hunter machine.

I've thought about making a better mount for the level, which would allow me to zero out the gauge vertically, but this has been working so well, I never bothered. If someone comes up with something better, send me a note.

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BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir

This past Saturday we went to the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Temple in Lilburn GA. This is an amazing temple and a serious work of art. The entire structure is floor to ceiling marble and the carvings and detail work is incredible. This particular one in Atlanta is the largest such temple outside of India and is a place we're going to have to take our Atlanta visitors from now on. We also did a little "mini tour" and learned a bit about the Hinduism. I wish I could have gotten some pictures of the interior but there are no cameras allowed inside. I took a panorama of the structure from the outside and a shot of the fountains out front.

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House WIP

So we've got most of house completed. Took a couple of weekends working our butts off, but it was totally worth it. The appraisal came back right at the amount we needed, and the house looks awesome inside now. We decided to put the outside on hold until the spring, and at that time redo the shutters and tear ALL the bushes out to create a clean new look. As far as the inside, we finished everything except the crown molding in the upstairs hallway. We didn't need to do it for the appraisal and I haven't been inspired enough to take care of recently :) The bathroom came out being our favorite "after" room, as Cathy's paint work on the cabinets transformed them from old school oak to a nice looking cherry finish.

Here are a couple of pictures of the WIP and the "before" on the bathroom. Once we put our paintings/etc on the walls and finish cleaning up I'll take some after pictures.

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The remodel continues (finishes?)

Since we moved into the house, we've been planning to update pretty much the whole look of the house. We've done a fair share of things, kitchen, downstairs paint, master bedroom paint, etc, but we certainly have started to slack off a bit.

With the mortgage rates being so down, we decided to refinance. With the refinance comes an appraisal. With the appraisal.....holy crap, we've got a lot to do! lol. We realized that we have to finish up all the "almost done" projects, as well as do a couple more updates in order to appraise at the number we need to get our super low rate. Loooong list of to-dos, but working our asses for through the next week, should have everything done.

• Office and Guest Bathroom
  • Paint walls
  • Prime and paint windows and trim
  • Prime and paint closet doors
  • Replace outlets
• Guest Bathroom and Laundry Room
  • Take down wallpaper and paint walls
  • Prime and paint cabinets in both
  • New light fixtures
• Kitchen/Stairs
  • Finish crown molding
  • Prime and paint stairwell and trim
  • Prime and paint all doors
• Upstairs Hallway
  • Crown molding
• Outside
  • Replace shutters
  • Pull some bushes to clean up look
• Clean all the carpets with our fancy Electrolux cleaning machine

Dang! Thats a lotta stuff.

How many times does "x" occur in a string?

Had to figure out how many times a single characted occured in a string today. Found a nice clean way to do that instead of running a loop. Remove all the instances of that letter or character in the string, and the subtract that from the original length of the string. Viola.

You can also adapt this to multi character strings by dividing the result by the amount of chars in your search string. If you look for "asdf" in "1234asdf1234asdf1234asdf", you will remove 12 characters. Divide that by 4, and you have found "asdf" three times. Two examples below where the result is 3

str = 1234x1234x1234x;
str.length - str.replace(/x/gi,'').length;

str = 1234asdf1234asdf1234asdf
(str.length - str.replace(/xxxx/gi,'').length)/4

Its the end of the world...

...as I know it, and I feel fine. See if you can figure that out from the pictures below :)

Steamboat has continued to be awesome. The weather has been great and we got to catch the sunset on top of the mountain. We also went snowmobiling yesterday. It was a blast! A few pics below, and I'll post the whole set when we get home.

Here is a big panorama I took. Its a reaaaally wide and big picture so be ready.

Steamboat!

We started out our vacation by flying into Denver and heading up to Fort Collins. Our friend Chuck lives there, and we picked him up on our way to steamboat. While we were in Fort Collins we took advantage of the New Belgium brewery tour. New Belgium makes Cathy's favorite beer, skinny dip, as well as one of my faves, Fat Tire. With it being winter, they had a few awesome seasonals on tap, and it was the perfect start to our vacation. After a round of beers, it was time to head up to Steamboat.

Since we left Fort Collins late, we knew we would get a little of the snowstorm that was coming in, but we didn't quite expect it to be as bad as it was. We were driving 20mph and using our GPS to tell us where to road was headed as we couldn't see a damn thing out of the windshield. It was a helluva drive, but we made it no problem.

The skiing yesterday was sort of tough, as the 12 inches of snow didn't get groomed in time. The blues turned more difficult as ruts developed. It also snowed all day, and the fog made visibility a little short. It was still an incredibly fun time and we got our ski legs under us, as we haven't been out since Breckenridge last year.

Today was a totally different day, as the sun shone through, and the 13 degrees felt more like 50. The slopes were just awesome and we took quite a few runs down. Cathy turned in a bit early as her back was hurting, but the rest of us finished off the day on the slopes. We took quite a few runs on Tomahawk and the surrounding blues, did some jumps, and finished off the day with "3 oclock run" which was about the longest black diamond ever. Here is a pic from 3 oclock with the iPhone. I'll take the real camera tomorrow and have some awesome pics.

Time flies when you are ......

So I can't believe its been pretty much a whole month since I posted anything. Even though it was supposed to be a super easy one, the last few weeks have been pretty busy and crazy.

ARRC
So November started out with the American Road Race of Champions. I have a car that is absolutely capable of winning this IT National Championship, but it wasn't to be. While I had a great qualifying run, I got punted on the 3rd turn of the 1st lap, which ended my race in a rough way. I ended up getting pinballed around by a few cars, and ended up out of the race, every panel on the car bent, and some busted suspension pieces. I was and am pretty miffed about the incident, so I took some time off from the car and decided to worry about other things for a while. I'll get back to the race car early next year. About $2k worth of damage or so, so not the end of the world. I had really shitty video, again, which prompted me to ask for a new bullet cam for Xmas. Next year, I'll have plenty of video action.

Kitchen
So we finally finished painting the damn kitchen :) The color ended up great, and Cathy's mom visited and helped with painting the trim. All we gotta do now is clean it up and take some pictures. Coming Soon!

New Hobby - HTPC
For thanksgiving, we went to visit Cathy's brother and family, and I saw their showtime streaming box for streaming PC content to their HDTV. Oh I was hooked. After considering a few options, I realized I had my old pre-upgrade PC still sitting in our office. I purchased a case at Microcenter, and a few hours later, had a new HTPC (Home Theater PC). 720p Blue Ray movies, TV shows from Europe, playing h.264 converted backups of my DVDs. I love it. Also for my birthday, I bought myself a new receiver, so now everything in the entertainment center is using HDMI. This thing is awesome. After watching Casino Royale in 720p with DTS sound, I think it started to grow on Cathy as well :)

Work has also been nuts. We've been working on some end of the year projects and its been 150mph since the beginning of October. All exciting work, but I've been working so much, I've been forgetting to post some of the cool stuff I've been doing. Once the new year hits, I'll have to write some of the cool JS things I've done on here.

Last but not least, we're heading to Colorado for the next week. Going to do some skiing, snowshoeing, and snowmobiling in Steamboat Springs. Its been snowing pretty good the last few weeks out west (we have 28" of base) so the skiing should be good. We'll have plenty of pics of the trip and shenanigans when we get back. Its also going to be VERY weird not working for 2 weeks (going to Raleigh right after), but somehow I think I can manage :)

HDTV == HDTV

So I went to Brandsmart tonight and pulled the trigger on an LG 47" LCD HDTV. When compared to the Sharp Aquos 52" we were thinking about, it just had better "pop" on the blacks, no matter what the settings. Also figured that sitting 8-10' from the TV, the 47" would actually look better.

Took this thing home and plopped it right next to the 3 year old LCD Projection 50" Hitachi that I currently have. I was thinking that I'd get a big upgrade in black levels, sharpness, picture quality etc etc by going to a "new" LCD TV versus the LCD projection that I've had for a while now.

After hooking both of them up to the cable box and tinkering with some settings on both TV's (got the LG looking great with the recommended CNET settings and then set up the Hitachi to look like the LG), we realized that its the same damn picture. While there is a slight difference in the black levels, its definitely only slight and can be noticed when viewing dark scenes. Watching normal TV, or discovery HD as we were, its hardly damn noticable. Maybe with a Blu-Ray player we could see it, but on normal HDTV and then upscaled regular DVD, there is just no way to justify the purchase.

I guess in the end I saved myself some $$ as it looks like we're just going to keep this 50" Hitachi till it goes away, or until OLED's come down in price, cause it ain't worth it going to a 1080P LG LCD right now. Color me surprised.

Uwharrie!

On the way home on Sunday, we stopped by Uwharrie National Forest with a few friends, Jeff, Mike, and Dante. Never having been "really" 4 wheeling, I had no idea what to expect. On the way in we stopped by the main outpost, got some maps, aired down the tires, disconnected the swaybars, and took off up the mountain. Dante, having been there numerous times, led the way to the hardest trail, Daniel. I was definitely skeptical of the Jeep making it over all the obstacles and rocks, but it took it like a champ! We finally found the secret of wheeling a Jeep without lockers, left foot braking. Dragging your left foot on the brake while trying to go up a slippery rock/hill slows down the tire trying to spin, and lets grab instead of it just spinning like crazy. Also, it really is about the driving and not your equipment. Dante with his mostly stock, lockerless, 4 door ran through all the obstacles like they were a cobblestone road.

We decided to keep Zoey in the back of the Jeep instead of tying her up at the campsite, and despite the constant bouncing in the back of the Jeep, I think she had fun. During one of the rock crawls at Kodak rock, she decided she wanted to sit in the front seat. Then exactly at the worst possible time, she slipped and popped the Jeep into neutral. It was a little scary at the time, as I thought I broke something :) I took plenty of pics as it was a beautiful day. Thats not a polarizer filter, the sky really was that blue. I realized afterwards I took mostly pics of our Jeep and Jeffs. Dante with his superior 4 wheeling skillz was always up over the rocks and then walking back to help the rest of us, so I only got 1 pic of his Jeep.

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