TrevorCarpenter.com

This summer has a huge list of great potential blockbuster films being released. I’m curious about some, and down right excited about others. Here’s the list, in order of release date…

• Iron Man
• Speed Racer
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• The Dark Night
• Kung Fu Panda
• Hancock
• Get Smart
• WALL-E
• The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
• The Clone Wars

OK, so the last one isn’t a theater release. But, it must be on there! Any continuation of the Star Wars saga must always be included.

Now, some of these you might have skipped, and that is your right. I, however, am very excited about each of these.

If I remember, I’ll try to review each of them, as I see them.

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I have two, unrelated, things to discuss right now. I really, really want your input.

#1 Wordpress 2.5

Wordpress 2.5 is finally released. I haven’t upgraded yet. Mostly because I was a little afraid. You see, the administration panels are drastically different. I’ve been listening to WP podcasts, and reading WP blogs so that I can learn as much as possible.

Someone suggested a test blog. So, this morning I decided to launch a test blog, at http://test.trevorcarpenter.com, and play around. I have been wanting to play with a few plugins, and decided that this would work best for them too.

Once the blog was up and running, my plan was to mess with the plugins first, then upgrade to the 2.5 beta. But, when I sat down to begin, I saw that 2.5 was out of beta, and official. So, I tossed the plugins for now.

The test blog is running 2.5, and the admin dashboard is very different. I’m excited. I like new things.

#2 Moab Photography Workshop

I have the days off, and I really, really want to go to this exciting photography event in Moab, Utah. I can drive it in 10 hours, and I’m willing to take my car. I plan on camping, to save cash and have a bit more fun. If you can make it, you should try and attend this one. Ann Torrance, who helps plan and organize the Salt Lake City Photowalks, is speaking and she give it a good review.

For those SoCal photographers, who want to go, let’s carpool!

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A week back, I really wanted to hit The Getty Center with my daughter, The Princess. We lost our shot, and so I rescheduled for this week.

Yesterday, we drove down to the parking structure, adjacent to the 405 freeway, just down the hill from The Getty. If you don’t know about The Getty Center, it’s possibly one of the best and largest collections of art in the Southern California region. It opened a few years ago to some huge fanfare and has been busy ever since.

You have to pay $8 for parking, but getting into the museum is free. Yeah, free!

I actually wanted to take public transportation all the way down there. Unfortunately, public trans in LA is a joke. There are several different organizations operating different parts of the system. So, we’d have to get on a borrowed seat on the Amtrak train out of Camarillo. Technically we’d be traveling the Metrolink. However, they don’t have enough trains, or something, and they rent seats on Amtrak. Then we’d connect with LA’s MTA for a bus to the Sepulveda/Getty drop-off. Here’s the catch. It’s $18, per person, one way. So, the two of us would be paying $72! That’s more than two tanks of gas in my little commuter Scion. We opted to drive. If urban communities want to help people contribute to helping the congestion, they need to be cheaper than driving. Even with today’s high gas prices, it’s a joke to think that I’d choose a 2 hour trip down and then 2 hours back, for more money.

OK, back to The Getty.

The Princess and I had a great time. We arrived around 11am and headed straight to the first building. We basically wandered from one to the next, covering every inch of each building. In one of the paintings exhibits, the have this really nice room with several large pieces on the walls and a couple of sculptures. They are all very typical museum pieces. Then, in the middle of the room they have several tables and drawing easels set up. The point is for anyone to wander up and sketch your own interpretation of the art on display. There were many people of varying ages that wandered in and out as we were there.

Well, The Princess is a very good artist. So we took the time so that she could sketch something of her own. She sat down at the table and looked around for a bit. Then she sorta grunted an “OK, I’m ready.” She leaned down and began to draw. It took me a few minutes to realize what she had chosen as her focus. She was drawing a young woman a few feet from her, who was in turn drawing one of the large paintings. It really was surprising to me. I was even a little emotional as I considered what she was doing. I wondered how many accomplished artists would have considered to draw someone drawing.

I could not pass this chance up, so I shot off a few frames. As you can see, she did a splendid job.

We took a break for a late lunch and then continued into the Photography exhibit. It was there that I discovered that they want to show you photographs, but don’t really like photographers.

Let me clarify. No one really gives me a hard time. I don’t let them. Also, the average security guard is intellectually scared off when you start using 3 or more syllable words. I engaged him with a short diatribe about copyright, and derivative works. He didn’t follow. I allowed him to leave, and I shot my one and only rule-breaking-shot. “This one’s for Thomas Hawk,” I thought to myself.

When we finished there, we decided to head home. We didn’t have time for the beautiful gardens, nor much more than one quick stop to enjoy the view. I promised her we’d return once more. Possibly for a group photowalk, this summer.

Above all, I had a great time with my daughter, enjoying some beautiful artwork and taking picture together. She’s a lot of fun. Oh yeah, BTW, that was her school day.

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I’m just chillin’, watching Disney’s Enchanted with The Wookiee, and The Padawan keeps jumping up and down on the toy box.

I hollered at him a couple of times, “Stop doing that. It’s loud, and you could hurt your little brother.” You see, The Joker was playing right next to the toy box.

Moments later, I hear nothing but a sucking wind. You know the sound? It’s the sound of a one year old, hurt so much that he can’t cry. He’s trying to suck in enough air, so that he can let out the most horrible cry of his life. Yes, The Padawan had jumped again, and crushed The Joker’s little right hand under the lid of the toy box. I was angry, but I didn’t have the time to punish him. The Joker was in a lot of pain. The lid had come down on his little hand, right where his fingers join his hand. There was a nice dark red line across his knuckles and a purple spot on his ring finger. Poor baby.

As I tried hard to get control of the situation, many things raced through my mind. First, Deanna was off with The Princess in the family car, with the car seats. Ah! There was no way I was going to drive my three boys to the hospital, not in car seats. Luckily, we live 3 blocks from the hospital. I called Deanna as we prepared to leave.

I scooped up the boys and we raced out the door, walking/running to the ER. As we entered the parking lot, the screaming stopped. I looked down and also saw that The Joker was actually grasping his blanket with his injured hand.

I gave him a little assessment, and he did not wince or cry when I touched his injured area. Hmmm. So I called Deanna to see where she was. She was driving into the parking lot. Once she found us, she also checked out his hand, and agreed. The Joker would survive.

We drove home.

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So I hit the Pro Photo Expo, in Pasadena, CA, recently. It was a little bit of a let down, but fun none-the-less.

I expected the expo to be a bit larger. However, I did get all the questions answered that I needed, and I got to play with some cool equipment.

Because I have a Nikon D40, with a limitation on which lenses will connect, I was curious what everyone was planning to offer in the near future. Wanting to continue to grow my lens assortment, I need this information. I also have been considering a few different bag choices, more on that later. The guys at the Sigma booth were very helpful, even let me put a few lenses I’m considering on my D40, to play around. The guy at the Pocket Wizard booth was helpful, and confirmed my plan of attack for building up an assortment of those bad boys.

The two highlights of this event for me were the Apple booth and the Lowepro booth.

First, Apple. When I first walked in, I made a swift right hand turn and proceeded to wind through the expo, hitting every isle. The first booth I stopped at was the Apple booth. They were there promoting one product; Apple Aperture 2.0. Since I’ve recently fell in love with Aperture 2, I was a bit excited. I looked at my watch and asked one of the Apple guys, “How long is the demo?” He said it was about 45 minutes, and I decided to sit just as they began a new one. This proved very profitable, as now I feel equipped to get started with Aperture 2 as my primary asset management and post production tool. I’ll do the majority of my editing with Aperture 2, only switching to Photoshop for the major stuff.

Second, Lowepro. As you may know, I have a unique day job. With this day job, I am authorized to carry certain tools that require a little concealment. So, on occasion, I am limited with what clothing I can wear, or what packs and bags I can carry. Being right handed, I generally am also limited with how I can carry my camera bag, a nice Lowepro waist pack/shoulder bag. So I have been actively seeking a bag that can serve both needs.

I found what would be the absolute best bag, made my Maxpedition. This bag is not really a camera bag. However, with the proper padding, it would serve me quite well. I told this story to the nice lady, Suzie, at the Lowepro booth. Without hesitation, she swept me to the products, to find the bag that most closely matches the inside measurements of the bag I want from Maxpedition. Not understanding her point, I picked the proper bag. She then handed me her card, and instructed me to email her my address. She had Lowepro ship me the “guts” to this bag, for my own use in inserting them into the Maxpedition bag. Unbelievable! That’s customer service!

I was really excited and surprised at her offer, and I really didn’t believe it until the “guts” actually showed up just a few days later.

The fit is not perfect, but I will be able to make it work. Most importantly, I have a nice, padded compartment that will hold my camera, with a lens, and two additional lenses.

This bag has the large compartment, for the camera stuff, and several additional compartments for a variety of items. I’ll be able to carry along a typical Nalgene bottle, my special cargo, and many other important items.

I now have a man-bag!

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Today I found a great article on Digg. It’s titled, The List of Things That Offend Muslims. The post is from the Amboy Times. To sum it up, the Amboy Times probably isn’t high on the list of freedom hating followers of Islam. I’ve tossed in a quote below…

“The intent of the list is to illustrate the futility of the multicultural approach to Islam. Sharia law demands submission not only from Muslims, but from non-Muslims as well. This makes respectful coexistence nearly impossible with Muslims in Infidel lands. The examples below serve as reminder that submitting to one complaint or another only emboldens Muslims to seek to further their ultimate goal of establishing sharia.”

The point is to highlight how many silly and stupid things have offended followers of Islam, or were changed out of the fear of offending the followers if Islam.

It’s just interesting, very interesting.

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I briefly blogged about the upcoming Pro Photo Expo, in Pasadena, a few weeks ago. It starts this week, and I’m planning on attending on Sunday.

Oh, and Bryan, the Expo only price is $10. w00t!

Upcoming link.

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As you’ve read here before, I am a huge fan of cutting edge television technology. More specifically, we Tivo, Netflix, and some times even torrent programming. Early on, after we got the Tivo, we tried Amazon’s Unbox service. Not bad, but they had a tiny selection. Since our Tivo is not an HD unit, we quickly looked at other choices.

Then we got Netflix. Sweet! I love Netflix. At first I used it almost entirely to watch the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica. I found BSG at the beginning of season 3, and wanted desperately to watch all the earlier stuff. However, with me only benefiting, I saw the wife loosing interest quick if I didn’t sweeten the deal. So, every so often I’d include some kid’s movie that we missed in the theater. Then we went from one-at-a-time to two-at-a-time. That really helped. I tried hard to make sure that I had one and she had one with each turnover. Once we found House, about the same time I caught up on all the BSG episodes, she really started enjoying Netflix. I knew she had accepted it when she would navigate through the queue and prioritize the upcoming movies for herself.

Somewhere in there we got our HDTV. That really was a massive step us for us, as it pertains to entertaining ourselves. We upgraded to HD cable just after that and have really enjoyed our network programming in HD and even the occasional cable show, like Discovery’s Planet Earth. Then the Xbox Marketplace started adding movies we actually wanted to watch, and our HD movie watching experience began. What fun that has been. Now, I won’t even consider renting a movie that doesn’t have an HD option.

Then, for the few of my Twitter and Pownce friends, you saw me mention last week that I gave an already cancelled Sci-Fi program a shot; Firefly. Holy cow! How did I miss this one?

I quickly found a way to get the entire season, plus extras, and started watching it. However this one proved to be a little challenge. It also gave me the chance to try out my new set up. Just last month, I reinstalled OSX on our extra Mac Mini and hooked it up to the HDTV, via the DVI. I stripped off all the applications that would be unnecessary and simplified the extras I knew I would need. This system would become my very own, more powerful Apple TV. No hacking required for web browsing and access to things like Divx/Xvid support, alternative media viewing with VLC, and more freedom with my iTunes media. It took less than 30 minutes to get all the correct codecs installed and to set up my dock just right. I have a bluetooth mouse, for navigating, but no extra wireless keyboard. Now if only I could figure out a way to navigate the OS, simply, with the Apple remote. I digress. Firefly…

So, I had set this up a few weeks back and hadn’t really had a chance to give it a try. With my newfound interest in Firefly, I decided that it was ready. The weakest link was the audio quality. For now, all I have is a simple 1/8″ to RCA cable. This is plugged into the audio out of the Mac Mini and into our audio system, stereo only. For now it will have to do. (There’s a chance I may have a used Logitech USB audio interface coming my way. It has optical input/output and some other nice features.)

I have stored the entire season of Firefly on my primary computer’s external hard drive. They are wrapped in an AVI container in a nice Xvid format. With the right codecs installed, these files should play just fine in Front Row. For some reason they don’t. No problem, that’s where VLC arrives to save the day. Yes, yes, I could try and troubleshoot the first problem, but I just didn’t have the energy. Someday, I’ll figure it out. This time, I just wanted to watch Firefly.

Quickly using the mouse, I opened up the first episode of Firefly, over the network, in VLC and hit the full screen button. It started just fine. Now in all it’s compressed/HD glory I sat back and enjoyed Firefly for the first time. Additionally, to my satisfaction, the fancy little Apple remote works just fine controlling the playback in VLC. Mmmmm, technoligic.

I’ve also watched a few of the iTS purchased episodes of The Office, which play quite nicely. Now all I have to do is try out renting a movie through iTunes, to see how easy that works.

I’m ready for DVD’s to go away, and have no plans on playing around with HD-DVDs or Blueray-discs. I’m going to skip them all together.

Here’s a lesson for all those greedy, communists running the huge media companies. I’ll buy it or rent it, if you offer it through one of the dependable, high quality alternatives. But, if I want to watch it, and you’re stuck in 1990, then expect me to get the content I want, where I can. I’ll pay for it, if you let me.

Then, recently I bought a PSP, (the special edition Darth Vader one!). I thought that I’d give the little thing a try for playing some games. It came with Star Wars Battlefront II and I got SOCOM II to go with it. Without reviewing each game here, I enjoy them both and am glad to have them. One thing holding me up has been that I failed to get a Memory Stick. So, I couldn’t save any of my games or update the software when the Skype addition came out last week.

That just would not do! I found a sweet deal at Circuit City’s website for a 2gig Memory Stick Duo Pro ($30) and then shot over to my closest one to pick it up. Yes! I’m in business now!

The next day was my first chance to try and load up a movie. I loaded up ffmpegX and re-encoded the Firefly AVI’s into the perfect PSP format; mpeg-4. ffmpegX actually has the perfect settings built in as an option. No messing around. Even cooler, that sweet open-source app names your new movie following the PSP’s lame naming convention. It’s hard to find the right movie file, but I don’t care. I can now watch movies on my PSP!

The very next change I had, I watched the second episode of Firefly, on the PSP. Awesome!

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Sometimes I wished that I knew some of the basic tactics used in the hacking underworld. A fellow blogger was hacked and screwed out of his personal domain name.

Read more here.

There are times I wish I could join the effort to track down the #$**@ and help teach him a lesson.

Oh, and BTW, check your own Gmail accounts for the hack that screwed him.

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Most of you know by now about the December Challenge I’m running. So far I’ve seen over 30 people participate on Zooomr and Flickr. Portraiture was a big scary monster to me, before this project started. Now…I want to shoot them as a part of my business. Am I that good? Naw, but you don’t have to tell anybody.

My pal Brian Auer, over at Epic Edits, is running a project for us all to shoot a self portrait. Now, most of you may have already done that, as a part of the December Challenge. However, if you haven’t I urge you to use what you’ve learned so far this month, and shoot yourself!

Here’s mine:

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I just upgraded my blog’s app, Wordpress, to the latest version, 2.3.1. Cool. That didn’t hurt at all.

Another thing, I’m toying with my theme. So, bear with me as I find a good working theme for me.

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So, as you know, I’m in love with Ubuntu, the Linux distribution that is teaching all the others how to get it done.

We have a nice Mac mini, that has been running the latest Ubuntu version, Feisty Fawn, for a couple of months now. Every so often, I fiddle around, cleaning something up, and discover another cool, stable feature of Ubuntu that makes me smile.

At work, I’m forced to use MS crap, and I hate it. I never smile while using Windows. Never.

So, with a few regular months of using Ubuntu as our primary OS, for regular everyday stuff, I’m even more sold that Ubuntu really is a generational leader for top notch operating systems.

So, with today’s release of Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon, I’m proud to say that I’ve upgraded and I love it. It’s just as attractive and easy to use as before. Many of the subtle system upgrades are now organized in a nicer, more logical set of menus.

Just a few of the outstanding upgrades:

• Fast User-Switching
• Awesome 3D effects, by default, (Compiz Fusion)
• Really fraking awesome graphical interface for messing with X.
• Plug and play printer support.
• AppArmor, basically it helps you keep your computer secure by restricting what certain applications can do.

Gutsy simply rocks! If you’re already using Linux, you’re crazy not to upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon. If you’re an Intel Mac user or any Windows user, you’ve got to try this out.

What’s really cool is that you can download it and burn it to CD. Then you can boot off the CD, and it runs a fully functional OS, ready to play with. When you realize that you like it, just click on the install icon on the desktop and presto, you’re installing the world’s greatest operating system.

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