It’s Just Justin

Don’t Think I Told Ya

So I haven’t been very good at updating, but this time around I have a really good excuse.

A little over a week ago, I had surgery on my left wrist to repair some damage from an old Starbucks accident.

It was supposed to be a really simple, 45 minutes, twilight anesthesia…  Then it got bad.  Turns out they had to cut a ligament or two, shave some bone and then put it all back together.  So right now I’ve got just one wrist that actually works.  Typing is a bitch and photography is nearly impossible.

So right now I’m a total gimp, and my medical fun doesn’t stop there!  So far this week I have had four medical tests/exams and two more coming up.  Yuck.  

Right now I feel pretty darn fine, besides the pain in my left wrist.  The vicodin helps but knocks me out and make me quite the entertainer as I attempt to walk around my apartment.  Hilarious!

Ryan and I have an adorable garden… in our living room.  It’s a little too cold to set the plants free but, soon enough.

Ok, sleepy time.  Sorry I am so random, it’s late, yeah.

Tags: Garden, Medicine, Pain, Ryan, Sick, Sleep, Surgery, Tired

Lord, I’m Funny

Maybe it isn’t so funny, but I sure got a laugh outta myself…  I’m terrible, I know.  

Reminds me of something I said, to myself, today, “No offense, but you’re Asian”.  It made no sense but…  I think it’s from listening to This American Life’s podcast of The Onion.

Tags: Comedy, Funny, iChat, NPR, Racism, Random, Skitch, The Onion

Engadget… Why I Oughta!

My AppleTV has been acting up… I think it might have something to do with the fact it gets two trillion degrees…  There is a fan in there but damn, that thing gets hot.  I opened it up to replace the hard drive, using Engadget’s directions.  

First, let’s look inside

Fan vent along the left, fan on the bottom left, audio/video, ethernet, usb, power inputs on the bottom.  Power supply along the right etc etc, nothing special (cough, this thing is fucking crazing).

Sadly, my upgrading of the measly 40gb drive to a 160gb drive didn’t go so well.  Engadget’s directions didn’t quite work.  Hard to mess up terminal commands…

dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/Users/justex07/AppleTV.img count=1335 bs=1024k

dd if=/Users/justex07/AppleTV.img count=1335 of=/dev/disk1 bs=1024k

2732016  309849759 

gpt add -b 2732016 -i 4 -t hfs /dev/disk1

diskutil eraseVolume “Journaled HFS+” Media /dev/disk1s4

gpt add -b 3141672 -i 4 -t hfs /dev/disk1

Plus a few gpt commands…  Well, no go.  Put the old drive in and it works well enough.  I’m just going to go the lame-oh way and have a kit shipped to be, pre-formatted hard drive.  Thanks Weaknees.com.

The thing is… After you get all of the tools, the Weaknees’s deal is as cheap or cheaper than doing it totally ourself.  Who knew?!

Tags: Apple, AppleTV, DIY, Doesn't Work, Engadget, Fuck, HardDrive, How-To, Kit, OSX, Terminal, Ugh

No Smoke, Just Mirrors

I decided to dip my hand into this tight aperture (f-22 to f-36) on a mirror game, literally.

Hard to take a picture of your own hand…  Lesson = learned.

Next time I am going to spin that dradle, I bet it would make for a pretty awesome shot.

Looks like motor oil but it is honey.  Sweet, delicious honey injected with red wine to increase the golden color.  Thought up that one on my own ;-)

Learned how to double my money in a flash!

My prized Nikon F3.  I never use it, but I do prize it.  Click for a larger version.

I didn’t have any food coloring and corn syrup to make fake blood so I just tried some of that wine.  No go.  Just couldn’t get that blood look.  So here’s the pic sans faux blood.  

Funny story, after putting all of this stuff up, i accidentally cut myself and bled all over the mirror haha, damn the timing.

Tags: Blood, Honey, Jew, jewish, Mirror, Money, Nikon, Photography, Picture, Ryan, Wine

Craigslist, Hmph

So, beyond being on a few missed connections, kinda funny really, I have never used Craigslist.  Today I did however and made a whopping three posts, whoa!  Oh and one bulletin board/forum post so I guess that’s four.

Yeah so anyways, I need to get back to my studying/reading/writing/brainstorming.

Tags: Bored, Class work, Coffee, Craigslist, Help, Kaldi's, Missed Connections, Personals, sale, School, Social Networking, Study, Tired, wanted, Work

Photography Project

I’m supposed to be working on this big project for my photography class.  The basis of it is experimental lighting to enhance a photograph.  I have done some quick and dirty examples of how doing some simple changes to your lighting and camera setting, you can turn a shitty picture into a great picture.

The first example is using a high aperture (f-22) along with a super bright light (650 watt) to light a scene versus using an automatic setting on a camera such as my Nikon D80.  First the auto setting shot.

All and all, it isn’t such a bad picture.  The problems are getting true whites and true blacks as you can see in the shot coming below.

Obviously better whites and blacks here.  Also, I manually set the white balance as opposed to the camera deciding what was white.

This next set is much more obvious.  I took a picture of my mother’s Aggie class ring on a mirror, a blush compact mirror at that.  With this shot I compared again, a 650 watt tungsten Arri light with the built in flash on my camera.  I again modified the f-stop to 22 on my manual shot.

As you can see, the flash blew out the color of the gold and the lower f-stop picked up all the light hitting the mirror.  It’s a plain old gross picture.  However, let’s see what happens when we set the aperture to f-22, pound the thing with 650 watts of light.

I swear, it’s like magic.  The silver mirror turns to black and the gold, which was previously washed to a pale yellow, is now a deep, rich 14ct gold.  Look at that reflection!  

These pictures are just the foundation of my project, showing how small changes in light can totally change a picture.  I intend to include emotive portraits and many other genres of photography in this series.  Here’s to hoping I can make it happen and make it something special, unique and captivating.

Tags: Aggie, Arri, Class, Family, Light, Macro, Mom, Nikon, Photography, Project, Ring, School, Scraps, Spoon, Strobe

Catch and Release Phishing

Guess what, I’m a Central Bank customer.  Oh wait, no I’m not.  But some Phishing scam people are sending emails to people at Mizzou email addresses hoping that at least a few are members of the local bank.  They have created a site that sure does look like Central Bank’s site care of an address that appears to be www.centralbank.net but is really 

http://www.centralbank.net7idpersonalbanking-secure-survey-id-98275.50secure.net.jikao.com.tw/.https://www.centralbank.net/  

They ask for your login ID, I put in “calloway42″ and hit login.  What do you know, I’m in!  

Notice the Phishing warning haha.  But I “logged in” and got to this next screen asking me for my opinion on some random things and then my account number, expiration dates and pin number.  

I’m pretty sure that I would need to provide a username and password to log into my account, at the least, and then they would already have this information.  With my bank, Bank of America, I have to have a user account ID, a pin number, a picture identifier and finally a code that is sent to my cellphone each time I try to log in just to make positively sure only I can log into my account.  If you want to do that, you gotta know those three items AND have my cellphone with you.

Oh well, it’s always fun to almost be phished.  Also of note, none of the phishing pages were secure.  Not the best phishing scam I’ve ever seen.

Ok, off to get my Lasik surgery!  

Tags: Bank, BofA, Caught, Evil, Hacker, Lasik, Money, Phish, Phishing Scam, Scam, Skitch, Stealing, Trick

I Love My Dad’s Internet

You simply cannot argue with 35mbps internet down and 23mbps internet upstream speeds.  I’m downloading a 690mb iso of Kubuntu in under three minutes.  

If I had this at home, I have 15mbps in Columbia, I’d be bankrupt… damn iTunes would be impossible to say no to.

Tags: Apple, Family, Fast, Highspeed, Internet, iTunes, Money, Speed Test

John Barnes for President

 

Tags: College humor, Comedy, Funny, Hillary, Politics, President, Vote

Which is it?

I was a beta tester for FileMaker’s Bento software, one of 250,000.  To thank us for our efforts (cough) they are allowing me to enter a competition (drawing) to win something.

The email says a 16gb iPod touch (sweet)!

The survey says “Prize to be determined” and the end of the survey says a 16gb iPod touch.

Meh, I entered anyway.  I’d love that touch though, make it so.

Tags: Apple, Rant, Skitch, Software, Win