idonthaveacoolname

I had a wonderful drive to and from Orangeville/Mono over the last several days! An old friend from high school asked me to his wedding and off I went! The wedding was at the Bride’s parents farm complete with horses for a beautiful outdoor wedding. The super moon was out, the food and company were wonderful. It is nice to reconnect with old friends and laugh. Here are only a few that I took since I decided to leave the camera in the case for the most part. The nature shots were from the Mono Cliffs Provincial Park when I did a nice hike the morning of the wedding, B&W from the wedding, and the beautiful little Payton with her loving dad. We also went to a fantastic restaurant where I ate several courses and repeatedly declined to repeat any of our high school days. After Tosca and the wedding, tomorrow will be tough to focus on work!

My friend KE and I went to the NAC last night to see the fantastic Tosca! I wanted to see it in Rome but I couldn’t make it work unless I re-ordered my flight. After a quick dinner at le Café both of us made our way to the mezzanine. The seats were awesome and while there was a minor hiccup with one of the characters dropping out at the last minute, the performances were spectacular! Michelle Capalbo was incredible as Tosca and David Pomeroy’s Cavaradossi was equally moving. Todd Thomas as Baron Scarpia rounded out this fantastic cast! We left quite impressed! The set design was spectacular, especially Act III! The set of Castle Sant’Angelo with St.Peters in the background highlighted the religious tension that is at the heart of Puccini’s masterpiece. Bravo!

All of us expected a weekend of rain and while I didn’t kayak, I certainly took advantage of the fine weather and explored the garden in front of the cottage with my camera. Macros with the ever stellar Olympus 60mm and clouds with my Nikon 50mm.

A couple of interesting pieces on Ferguson. The first by Nat Silver, noted Quant, who analyzes where police live and work. Surprise, more and more police live outside of where they police.

The second is a piece that bubbled to the surface recently here in Ottawa as a judge decided not to impose mandatory fees on a plaintiff. This trend is quite troubling and, historically, a precursor to full fledged debtor prisons. This piece in Marginal Revolution doesn’t mince words.

I walked around testing this combo to decide if I will take it with me on vacation. I love how this lens renders!

I am really looking forward to trying one of these on my trip! Great tutorial!

The shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is a tragedy. Yet another example of a senseless killing of a young man by the police. I understand that racism still haunts the United States of America but I did not realize how intractable this fear is or how pervasive this fear is among police officers. Thankfully the inept local police have been replaced by State troopers. /edit – Turns out that all the police can do is attack. There is, bizarrely, no other tactic. Each level of police seems incapable of realizing that it is their presence that is destabilizing. Have they learned nothing from other jurisdictions that have attempted to stop people from what they perceive as legitimate protest? Here is a link to video of police threatening the media.

Is anyone in charge here?

I hope that tensions ease and peace returns. This same sort of police action occurred in Canada several years ago targeting dissenters at the G-20 meeting in Toronto and I was disgusted by this abuse of power. I could not imagine living in a police state all of my life, which is what most minorities do in inner cites across the USA. It is ugly, this racism. Here is a very interesting blog called If They Gunned Me Down, a blog showing two images of each poster, asking the question: what photo would they use.

And here is a link from Jacobin to some good thinking on the subject of the increased militarization of the police force.

So I received word that my cables are shipping from Hong Kong as I mentioned but I just cannot wait that long to test out my tablet with an external hard drive. I could wait but I’m impatient. 🙂

I called around a few places and finally found a micro USB OTG (on the go) cable at my local computer store. They were out of stock but the sales clerk remembered seeing one somewhere in the back. I wasn’t hopeful but, sure enough, he was right! Dell should really ship one of these with the unit.

So with that in hand I bought a 4 port powered (very important) USB hub to connect it all together. Then I connected my external small form hard drive and voila! My Venue immediately recognized my hard drive! Success! The powered USB hub is important since the venue micro-USB port does not provide enough power to spin the hard disc in the drive.

And “success” is relative. I am still unable to power the unit while doing this. Works in a pinch but the other cables that will allow me to power up while importing images – the ones slowly making their way across the Pacific – should do the trick!

So the setup looks like this:

Venue –> micro USB OTG cable –> USB A Type / B Type –> POWERED USB hub –> hard drive AND SD card reader

Total weight, around 3 lbs!

Disclosure: I am writing this post on my Ipad.

My friend DR sent me a Dell Venue Pro 8 inch tablet (32Gb) that I am testing to see if I can use it in Italy as a tool to backup my photographs and video. Since I will be hiking in Tuscany I want to keep the weight down and will, therefore, not be bringing my MacBook Pro as I normally do when I travel. My iPad can’t do it since it will be 3 weeks of RAW images, no way I have that much drive space left and it doesn’t read the RAW format so in order to review my images I would have to shoot RAW and JPG ! My goal was an option lighter than 5lbs, the weight of my MacBook Pro. And without buying an Air or anything like that! Multiple SD cards are also an expensive option due to the high bitrate of the video files recorded with my hacked GH2. I need a device that can manage all of my images, preferably something that would run Adobe Lightroom. The workflow will be to connect an external hard drive and a USB SD card reader to a device and use Lightroom to import the files.

At first I had asked DR about Dell or Apple laptops but they were all comparable in weight with my MBP that I had gotten from him 2 years ago for a trip to Paris. The Venue option was really last minute, I had been planning on a netbook. While looking around at the Dell website I noticed these small Windows tablets. I asked, he shipped. Awesome!

The first great piece of news was that the shipping weight was under 2lbs! Impressive. I immediately unboxed and plugged it in. Next step was to update the tablet to Windows 8.1 and also update any drivers. I noticed that the available space was under 10Gb! Lots of bloatware that I uninstalled. But not a lot of space. But enough for my purposes.

I installed Lightroom from my network, no problem. I downloaded and installed some apps from the Store but was unimpressed that WordPress (that I would use to update this website) is no longer to be found at the Store (unknown reason but the mobile WordPress app is discontinued for Windows WTF?). And no Google Map app but there are substitutes, notably GMap that I really like! I can minimize the app and then when I re-open, it automatically brings me back to where I was before – do you hear that Google Maps? Apps matching my iPad for travel, both TripAdvisor and Booking, made it super easy to import all of my itinerary and booking information. So far, so good. Once installed and up and running, I found the Venue really quite impressive for its size.

The touch screen is responsive while in Tile mode but difficult to use on the desktop! It can be frustrating when trying to do basic functions. A mouse would definately come in handy, As would a keyboard since the 8inch screen has rather limited real estate. Those would add bulk though so no go. I did use Office: edit an Excel document and did minor edits in Word as well. I would not suggest using the Venue to replace other work tools without a keyboard and mouse.

I digress but having the ability to use MS Access database, network access, and input forms with the touchscreen could be quite useful to deploy in a team environment.

All in all the gestures are easy to understand and, coming from the iPad world, rather intuitive. Having the ability to organize your Tile screen is really great and implemented well.

I connected to my home network easily and tethered this device with both my iPad2 and my iPhone 4s. I am impressed with Windows 8! Functionality seems to be the priority in the design of the OS in Tile mode while also giving the user the ability to interact with a traditional desktop.

I downloaded VLC as a media player and set up the default folders to be my movie and tv folders on my home network. Portable access to all of my files just like my other devices, easily set up!

The not so good: I have mentioned the lack of hard drive space but a 64Gb is available and since this is a photography tool, I am using this primarily as a conduit between my camera and a backup hard drive. I need a few Gb for applications, but thats it.

The fatal flaw out-of-the-box is the inability to charge and hook up an external hard drive. This is needed on the road since overnight is the only time to fully power all of my camera and devices. It is also the time that I will need to backup my files and review my images. I assumed this functionality, connecting external hard drives while powering, would be central to a Windows-based machine? I guess that wireless connection is the preferred mode.

This is an issue when you’re not sure if you will have wifi!**

Google to the rescue. I found this solution and ordered the pieces. 8 bucks. Really? They couldn’t have included these with the Venue? Weird. More on this after they are delivered in 8-10 business days. Bummer. My two go-to computer places do not have any solutions, let alone lightweight ones.

Lastly, I was initially stumped by the fact that neither the front or back camera worked when I tried. The issue was a conflict between the hardware and Windows! I assumed that all of the hardware was functional, being made by robots and all, so I surmised that there was a device conflict. This is a Windows machine, after all! Once I uninstalled the Windows Camera update it worked fine. That took me 20 minutes to figure out.

More to come.

Step one is a success. I now have a light weight tablet that runs Lightroom and has the capacity to hard wire to an external hard drive.

Whether or not it will connect depends on those cables that I ordered. The ones that don’t come standard with the tablet. Argh.

Step two will be to use the ordered cables to charge the Venue while simultaneously importing files using Lightroom to a USB connected external hard drive.

* update : 2 of the 3 cables shipped. 15-20 days to ship from Hong Kong. Double argh.

** second update – I am going to test out a 1Tb Seagate wireless drive that will provide wireless storage with its own network. Pricey option but if it works, fantastic!

I went out kayaking this weekend and remembered people speaking of a bald eagle nest on a island in the middle of the Ottawa. I kayaked out at 6:30 Saturday morning. As I rowed closer to the island I could see the eagle flying away. Undeterred I kept going and finally ended up with only 1 clear shot of this rather skittish bird. The Panasonic 100-300 is a great lens but while rollicking in a kayak, focus was difficult. Notice the fish in its talons. I could hear the eaglets but couldn’t see them or the nest through the lens. The others are flowers that I shot with the olympus 60mm, including an incomplete focus stack.