Devauld.ca

With a wedding in Osoyoos this past weekend, and nothing worthy of professional fast telephoto status in my position, I was a little under the gun getting my hands on something. There is rental, of course; which is costly. Compounded when you are going to pick up one of these great beasts anyway. Inventory around North America is tight for all the new Nikon gear, and I've been on a waiting list for a AF-S NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G IF-ED VR for some time.

Having roots that involve a breeding program allow me to immediately pick out the pedigree from the name. The best in automatic focus with override, low dispersion glass and Nikon's new fancy vibration reduction system all play in making an amazing telephoto zoom. The difficulty, was getting a specimen.

After many frantic phone calls and instant messages, Mika came to my rescue. The only thing bigger than Mika's heart is his percentage in getting hurt at our photographic excursions. Always a man for barter, we struck a deal, and soon enough I held what I'd only read about.

I transported the lens to Osoyoos, where I put it to work producing what, in my opinion, are some fantastic portraits. Handheld, outdoors while it's overcast at I was able to have control over aperture like I've never experienced before. I couldn't help but smile when out on the golf course, packing about my gear and frantically trying to organize a wedding party, Saneal Camera called and told me my wait was over, and that my lens was in store.

Upon returning to Calgary, I went down and picked up a teleconverter and the largest addition to my lens arsenal. As soon as it was out of the box, I immediately started working on reducing the shortage and started a lens breeding program. The pedigree for these fine specimens is too close for comfort, and I may be tying up bloodlines by breeding siblings or some close relatives. You can get away with it for a bit with rabbits, I hope it's the same for NIKKORs. Either way I had to try, so I left them alone with various fruit and liquors for the evening. I don't really know how to sex the lens, or if they are asexual, but if lady luck looks my way, hopefully one them will have a litter in the near future. With my luck, Mika's got the girl.

The calendar is running my life these days.

Sonja's relatives made a brief stopover and we did our best to show them a good time. Hitting up some tourist destinations and a few places to look over some views of Calgary, it seems like they had just arrived and they were leaving.

The week in the middle collapsed into catching up around the house, getting some stuff set up, and of course the fiftyish hours a week I spend at the hands of TheMan®. It felt like the day after our guests left, we were packing up for a May Long Weekend camping trip

We had a nice car camping trip out to Handhills Highcountry Hideaway. The weather was very nice and sunny save for a freak thundershower with gusting winds on Sunday. The storm came and went on the inside of two hours, but those two hours happened to straddle the time we were making dinner. On Saturday, a group of us went out Geocaching and had a very productive day finding a grand total of six geocaches around the badlands. I forced myself to spend some time, laying on the grass, thinking about the present. Trying not to let the usual cacophony of thoughts roll about in my head, I watched my friends engage in several games of testie-toss. Sooner than anyone wished, our time spent sitting in the sun, and chit chatting by the fire had come to and end.

The hump day for my three day work week is only hours away, and on Thursday straight after work, we're going to make the long trek to a resort by Osoyoos for a wedding. It's going to be a very fun time, and I'm sure I'll have a yarn to spin upon my return.

The other contender was going with this shot, but I figured that more people had pictures of the side of a fire truck, than those who had a sound triggered photo of a firecracker going off in a wine glass.

In a couple of seconds I managed to mix in an event that would further complicate my already stupid and packed schedule. Monday morning, Mike and I were escorted to the top of the Telus Tower, in preparation for a photographic assignment. With climbing that evening, my camera sat and I was unable to retrieve the photographs I took in our brief introduction to the security of the tower.

Tuesday evening, I had some more free time, so I collected my laptop and card reader, got myself a glass of water and plunked myself down in the La-z-boy. Seconds later Aperature was sucking the photos off the card, and generating previews, so I grabbed the remote, fired up the television and reclined back with my water.

The confluence of events, led to me not quite being prepared with the water hit my lips, and I inhaled a bit of water, as opposed to drinking it. With my chair reclined and my laptop chewing away on my lap, I sputtered forward spitting out water, and spilling more than just a little from my glass. It probably doesn't help that my typical water vessel is most often confused with a bucket made of glass. Losing about a 1/10 of my schooner is probably equivalent to a small child's sippy-cup, something I should have been using in this particular situation.

My eyes went to the keyboard, which had puddled watter over most of the right hand side, and then to the water soaked screen which was now showing the white apple wait screen. By the time my eyes registered that my machine seemed more aware of its damage than I did, the screen flashed blank, while all the power lights remained on.

The shock and disbelief were astounding, afterall, my life was on the machine sitting on my lap. All my personal projects, GPS tracks and routes, trading systems and platforms and photography were on 2.5 inches of swimming hard disk. I immediately went to work drying it out, and the next day, without success of resurrecting the machine, I went to recovering the data. Again, not a whole lot of luck.

Being as though I'm a bit of what marketing departments classify as a power user, I wasn't as bad off as it would seem, as I do in fact have a backup mechanism. My photography, and all my personal coding projects are backed up offsite. I did lose things that missed the backup window, like photos from Las Vegas and camping, but comparatively minor when you consider that I've still got two people's wedding photos to deliver. I was elated when my parter reported that our system had kept both intact, save for some selection and cropping work. I had just gone through the motions to ensure database schemas and seed data were commited to my source repositories, so except for some GPS data, I did pretty well on the data recovery side.

The next couple of days were off kilter, and I became painfully aware of how big of a part that little bit of consumerism impacts my life. I'd find myself sitting at my desk wanting to check e-mails and stock prices, but be staring at a blank screen strictly out of habit. The events that followed, I blame on Mike.

Mike and I had spent some time culling wedding photography a few weeks back, and at that time, comments were made about how my MacBook was "slow as ass when chewing on the 14-bit, 12MB files my new camera produces. Like an acquaintance with an annoying habbit that you don't quite see until it's pointed out, after that moment, I was painfully aware of how long I'd wait just to get the file loaded and presented. At the same meeting, while I was talking about beefing up some of my hosting and possibly going to a co-locate setup, Mike showed me how you can get refurbished Apple products. With my unfortunate accident, it seemed like the perfect time to realize my dream of purchasing a Mac Pro.

I took a definite step away from mainstream, purchasing an 8-way machine which will have 8 GB of RAM at it's disposal, but I need some serious horsepower for my photography work, right? No longer will I have problems running virtual machines, or having applications like Photoshop, Illustrator or Aperture open at the same time. I should no longer have big waits when working with film scans or high resolution stitching. Furthermore, now that I've got a machine with a ballsy video card, I'm going to Boot Camp my self a Windoze box, and work on my micro. I'll even be able to partake in the September release of Spore.

The replacement has been ordered, and I've been watching the shipping tracker. It arrived in Calgary this morning, so it'll go out for delivery today. Tonight I'll use the door knocker number to ensure that I can pick up the beast tomorrow.

I was fortunate enough to get out of the city this weekend, and kick off the camping season. Easing into the year meant that we were car camping, and mother nature co-operated to make a very enjoyable weekend. As soon as the weekend had started, we made our way out to Sibbald Flats. The drive was nice, as it's a very short distance from Calgary and we managed to get out of town without being caught up in the weekend rush. Shortly upon arrival we had set up shelter and were sitting around the campfire talking with our company for the weekend. The campground was virtually empty, with our group sharing the loop with only another two other parties.

On Saturday we fired up a campfire breakfast, and after much deliberation, set out to find a Geocache. The trek towards the cache was about as straight as we could manage, which unfortunately took us straight up a respectable incline. We moseyed around the ridge and down by the lake, where the dogs were played out in the water.

Sunday a late morning and tasty breakfast set us in motion of clearing up the camp. All morning, as the whiskey jacks and chickadees yelled at me, I went out of my way to be in the moment. No thoughts of the day-to-day, what needed to get done, what was coming, what was had past or anything else that would ripple my pond of Zen. I took in the air, tainted with the smoke of deadfall, and loved every minute of it.