RCNevada

I was out at the wetlands in Henderson doing a little hdr and bird photography when this walked by……

If you blog you generally have a few rough drafts, or maybe just notes to get you moving. Well, I’m going through my drafts and wondering why I wrote some of them -okay, most of them.
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I have one on social networking:
Here’s the Reader’s Digest version. – I don’t get it.

I have a follower who is following 900+ people, is being followed by over a hundred, and who has a total of zero tweets.

–Could someone please explain this in terms I can understand?
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I started one on why I changed my WordPress theme:

–I read it carefully and decided that I had written the world’s most effective cure for insomnia.
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I started one about the A.R.Drone:
A four rotor rc helicopter you control with your iPhone.

–It doesn’t ship until Sept. 3, but maybe I’ll do that one after I scrape together the $300 and try it myself.
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I started one about a dude I know in Vietnam who’s been working his ass off to make three grand this month:
That’s not much money until you find out that the average per-capita income is about $2500 usd.

–That’s all I wrote down and I have no freakin’ idea where I was going with it.
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And finally:
David of the Wild Wild East Dailies has been back from Germany for while now and is once more comfortably ensconced in Ho Chi Minh City.
(A city where Crocs are a sign of importance, scooters rule the streets and where beer is served over ice.)

At any rate, David is writing again.

In his post “America: The illusion continues” David writes about Jonathan Harris and his plan to post one photo a day starting with his 30th birthday. –The pictures in and of themselves are, with a handful of exceptions, not particularly impressive, but each serves as an excuse for the words, which are impressive.
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A breakfast of black bread and vodka can only stave off a hangover for just so long, so that’s enough.

According to Google Analytics my traffic is so far in the toilet that even Roto-Rooter couldn’t find it. So now I need to start being nice to people to get links. This also means that I have to settle down and write shit someone else might want to read.

Or not…….

Decisions, decisions

A friend is in town for a couple of days and he came bearing gifts.

(The silver label is Russian Standard –almost as smooth as Jewel of Russia, and Chopin is the finest potato vodka on the planet)

Traffic? I don’t need no stinkin’ traffic.

Down in the Grand Canyon

If you’re thinking about moving to Las Vegas… Stay Home. Our official unemployment rate is at 14.8%.

This doesn’t count the people who have dropped off the unemployment rolls –I think the rate I read was around 6000 a month. (The same number of people who were moving to Vegas a couple of years back.), or the people who worked for cash and didn’t qualify.

On top of that, Las Vegas has been rated by Forbes magazine as the county’s most stressful city.

Oh yea, mustn’t forget that while the nation wide average foreclosure rate is holding at around 2%, last year’s rate here in Las Vegas was at 12%.

On the other hand, if you have a business that doesn’t require most of your income come from local spending, Las Vegas has a lot of empty office and warehouse space and if you shop around you’ll find that houses are cheap.

–Note to self: Be nice to the boss.

I do a bit of macro photography and adjusting the flash can be a royal pain. –So I invested in a pair of battery powered fixed output leds by DLC.

They may not dimmable like Litepanels MicroPro, but at $99 they cost about 1/4 as much.

As with all new toys, as soon as I got home I charged the batteries and started playing.

The first problem I ran into was that SWMBO says even one light is too bright for close range portrait work, it made her squint.

Unless they’re Popeye squinting is not going to be most people’s best look, so, not having an overwhelming urge to get the crap beat out of me by an irate female swinging a D300, I deleted all pictures of her and moved on.

Since then I’ve discovered a couple of other minor annoyances. The sliding mount is so short that it only fits comfortably on one side of a D300 and I have to adjust the EV to about -.7 to use them up close. — On the upside they give me a constant light source and make it easier to see where the light falls so I don’t have things getting lost in the shadows or get those unexpected reflections I sometimes encounter using flash, even with a diffuser.

Now I’m off to build a pair of diffusers, and dig out my old Lepp bracket.

Is it just me or does this thing look like a missile launcher?

They have this beastie over at Pioneer Loan and Jewelry (a local pawn shop).

The guy that pawned it put a lot of effort into the brackets connecting these two telescopes just so he could use them simultaneously.

He said the bottom telescope is for viewing the stars and the top telescope has a camera adapter to capture nebulae.

Ya know….. I’m reasonably certain that the guy built it to look at the stars, but I bet if some voyeur found this under the tree at Christmas it would make his whole year.

(I wonder what would the neighbors say if I put this contraption on my roof and started tracking airplanes?)

According to Advertising Age the Wall Street Journal is now publishing coupons in it’s weekend edition.

The Journal said coupons will just make the paper more compelling for everyone. “Who doesn’t like some value, regardless of their income?” asked Michael Rooney, chief revenue officer at the Journal. “Everybody likes a good deal.”

“Business is our core but we no longer are the second read in any marketplace,” Mr. Rooney added. “As part of our effort to grow the business and serve our readers with a complete newspaper, this is added value.”

No, you did not misread that. The WSJ, that bastion of right wing stodgyness has stooped to the level the pedestrian press, and expects it’s readership to clip coupons.

This shows how desperate times are. It wasn’t too long ago the average reader of the WSJ was more likely to shop for stock in the grocery chain, than the stock on the grocery store shelves.

Coupons? In the Wall Street Journal? —A sign of the apocalypse??

BrewDog is a U.K. brewery specializing in anything but normal, namby-pamby beer.

Any taxidermist can stuff a squirrel, but how many of them are smart enough to use that squirrel to keep their beer cold?

Warning: The silliness of this video may offend those of you who are of a more sensitive nature, or are still sober.

The End of History from BrewDog on Vimeo.

The beer that comes in the stuffed critter is 55%, but if that’s too strong for you, or if you find drinking out of a dead stoat a trifle off putting, try BrewDog’s “Tactical Nuclear Penguin.” It’s only 32% alcohol and does NOT come in a stuffed penguin.

BrewDog Warning

“This is an extremely strong beer, it should be enjoyed in small servings and with an air of aristocratic nonchalance. In exactly the same manner that you would enjoy a fine whisky, a Frank Zappa album or a visit from a friendly yet anxious ghost.”

The company may be on the other side of the pond, but for those of you living in the U.S. who have an overwhelming urge to drink out of a recently deceased rodent, all is not lost. Preiss Imports of Ramona California has taken on the task of being the exclusive importer of BrewDog beverages for the USA.

Found on De Zeen magazine:

If you want to read Podravka’s annual report you have cook the book.

Croatian creative agency Bruketa & Zini? has designed an annual report for food company Podravka that has to be wrapped in foil and baked in an oven before it can be read. (And before someone else says it: This is a really hot idea.)

There are actually two books, both printed with thermal reactive ink. The larger book containing the numbers from the annual report and a smaller book containing five recipes.

All Bruketa & Zini? has for a website is a flash page that asks “who’s fault is it that we still don’t have a website?”
In a few moments a list of names appears with an excuse linked to each of them.