Sailing Away

Posted on October 21st, 2004 by Brian.
Categories: Personal Junk, Photography.

Well, I dropped Dawn off this morning (at 6) at a friend’s house who she is sailing with. There’s a group of 5 that are sailing the “Evensong” in the Harvest Moon Regatta from Galveston to Port Aransas. She’s set to sail out of Kemah at around 7:30 AM to get to Galveston for the 2 PM start, then they have about 24-30 hours in the Gulf to get to Port Aransas. I’ll be leaving tomorrow to drive down to meet them at the finish line (and it’s about a 5 hour drive). We’ll then stay Friday and Saturday night and I’ll drive her back in Sunday (the rest of the crew will sail/power the boat back Sunday &/or Monday).

If I can get out of Houston early Friday, I may be able to get to the finish line real early and set up my cameras to take pictures of the various boats crossing the line. Les (captain of the Evensong) offered to assist in marketing the shots to the various boats in the race. He seems to feel that 10-20% would buy some shots, especially the winners.
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0 comments.

Comment Spam

Posted on October 19th, 2004 by Brian.
Categories: General, Website Updates.

Just had my first instances of comment spam show up. The idiot spammed my very first post which is not viewable easily. I am guessing it was a script that looked for the generic first post the WP puts up.
Still that’s stupid - no one would see it but me. It was disguised as pseudo-religious crud for a gambling site and was deleted fast (got many of them before the system even notified me of their existance in the email).

12:12PM update: they are still at it, about 1 every 10 minutes, looks like they are working through the posts, first post 1, then 2, then 3, etc.
I had to add “poker” and “god” to my spam word list, so the comments are going into the moderation que - these are not words I normally would have in my posts, so it should not be a hamper on legit comments. So if you do post a comment with either of those words in it, be aware they will be moderated and will not show immediatly. And if spam they get deleted.

1:30 PM: The spams are continuing, but are getting caught by the filter. Also tried installing a hack to disable comments on old posts ( weblog tools ) but it does not seem to be working right yet. took this code out - did not work at all.

2:50 PM: In the hour I was away from the computer - 3 more had come in. With advice from TechGnome and code from Wordpress’ Wiki we’ll see if this helps.

Edit: 10/21 2:15 PM: It’s been 2 days since I implemented the above fix, and I have not had another problem since then. Yipee.

4 comments.

How Government Can Get More Money

Posted on October 18th, 2004 by Brian.
Categories: General.

I had a weird thought this mornign on the way to work.

Houston is experiencing a budgetary shortfall (as are most governments). This is no surprise as the last mayor was a wasteful sloth that pandered to sports team owners and special businessmen to give away prime real estate and all kinds of tax breaks, and had inept managers under him that gave high dollar and high profit city contracts to relatives and friends, and spent money follishly, and, well you get the point.
Now the new mayor is a bit better, but is still throwing money around foolishly (funding private museums? $5 Million for tasers for HPD when they are understaffed? etc).

Well how can the government take in more money? They are already robbing the public with sales tax, licenses & fees, traffic tickets parking meters, etc. Then it hit me: Robbing. They are already doing it, well let’s legitimize it. Historically it has been sanctioned (Privateering). But I have a less extreme proposal: Pick Pockets.
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Xmas Card

Posted on October 13th, 2004 by Brian.
Categories: Photography.

Snow Sentinals

Well the wife and I are planning our Xmas cards for this year, and so far this image is the winner for our card front. Especially when slightly tweaked to a watercolor like look and printed on porous paper.

About the image: This was taken outside Yellowstone’s south entrance in mid-May by Dawn. (Yes it was cold).

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Photo Company in the Planning Stage

Posted on October 13th, 2004 by Brian.
Categories: Personal Junk, Photography.

Most of the people that read this and that know me, know I love photography. I’ve had some of my stuff published as editorial shots in the media, and have had a few Pictures of the Day with various website competitions. And all this with consumer (not professional) cameras.

Well I, and a few friends (Chris & J), have been working on getting together as a photographic company to use our skills. The photo company (tentativly to be called Leap Day Photography) will be formed to allow the three of us to earn extra money (of course), but may evolve into a semi-fulltime gig. Initially it will mostly be aimed at the large markets: Event Photography (like weddings, etc).
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2 comments.

Lack of Updates

Posted on October 13th, 2004 by Brian.
Categories: General.

Haven’t really done much for the website in the last week. It’s been pretty busy at work (that’s a good thing). Plus we’ve been cleaning (including cleaning off my desk - should have taken pictures!) for tomorrow, heck I’ve done more cleaning/organizing at work than I have at home in the last week.

Tomorrow we have a big meeting at work with several associates coming in from the UK, DC, Florida, and locally. We’ve been working with these people as a sort of conglomerate/mutual-aid-group for awhile now (several years) and we are trying to firm up our relationships into a pseudo-company that can market together and work together easily. Let’s hope it works. Unfortunatly 3 of the key players were not able to make it to the meeting (one has a chest cold and can’t fly - but will be on conferance call, one is on a job in Florida consulting for an un-named media giant, and the other is in Europe arranging a security consulting gig).

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Paintball

Posted on October 2nd, 2004 by Brian.
Categories: General.

Went and played paintball today with a youth group from Dawn’s church. We got in about 5 games. Great fun. Also some pain. The assorted welts, bumps, and scrapes are not that much to worry about - but I got hit in the calf with a marker that did not explode. That one hurts - it’s like a bad knot that prohibits much movement. What’s worse is that it happened in the first game (near the end) so that kind of prevented me from doing any running or charging. Argh.

Here’s a link to the place we played: Bonanza
They’ve actually upgraded since they took the pictures (a Toll road is being built through one side of the property - so they took the money from the land sale to upgrade alot of the place)

3 comments.