My Canon Rebel XSi finally arrived, I’ve been waiting so long since they announced it. Gonna test shoot some photos today of my new Golden Retriever puppy Ralphie.
UPDATE: 2 seconds later… Crap I don’t own any SD cards, gonna have to go buy one.
Moving into my new building this weekend, formerly an art gallery and studio. It has been rezoned recently and is now considered multi-use. Some before pics below, I’ll be sure to take lots of photos of the progress. Maybe I will do a time lapse when I paint the rooms.
When you enter the front door, this is what you see.
Reverse View
This is the 2nd gallery room, includes the huge 34′x28′ room, also a hallway to the bathroom, and kitchen.
Reverse View
View of the ceiling from the middle room
The Bedroom. Needs a lot of work, 2nd bathroom on the left and closet on the right
The rest of the building, the warehouse. Stadium style HID overhead lighting, 22′ barrel roof, sound recording room in the far right. Vehicle ramp on the left.
I’m starting to realize the people who work at Teavana in the Cherry Creek mall have no clue what they are doing. Starbucks seems to have a better training program. This was my third visit to the store, in the past I’ve bought some Jasmine Pearl and Green Teas. On my most recent visit I stopped in the store to pickup a nice new glass teapot which I’ve been waiting for them to get back in stock. The glass teapot was very nice, I love it. It’s very delicate and made in China but its quality is equal to that of the French made Bodum teapots. It’s very delicate however, I hope that I don’t drop it. To go with the new teapot I wanted to get their “blooming” tea called Rose of Suzhou. First the person who worked there didn’t know what the components to this tea were. Well first it’s Marigold, Jasmine, Amaranth and White Tea and second it’s disgusting. Tastes like soy sauce soaked water. I’ve had this same tea that I ordered from Dean And Deluca once and it was so gentle tasting and even more beautiful. Oh well, what a waste of $36 and 4oz of tea. After paying for the teapot and the loose teas I inquired about some Pu-Erh, some good Pu-Erh, the kind that comes in a cake and you break off. The sales person directed me to an ornamental Pu-Erh, not something you would actually drink. hmm, oh well. I don’t know much about tea either, no expert here, but did learn Teavana really isn’t a place for Tea Lovers. In addition I ordered a Jamine Oolong to-go and they didn’t start making it until the sales person thanked me for coming in and I had to remind them I had a to-go order.
When I was in San Diego, I did discover once a really fine establishment with passionate employees. The place in near La Jolla and called Infusions of Tea which is located at 8750 Genesee Ave Suite 285 next to BookStar, Starbucks and PF Changs. Infusions of Tea is setup like a bar with a bartender and all the loose teas behind the bar. I highly recommend this place if you are in the La Jolla/UTC area.
So I suppose I’m still looking for a good tea shop in Denver, I can’t drive up to Boulder every time I want a goo tea experience. I guess since I’ll be here for a little longer I’ll keep looking. Oh and speaking of Boulder a good article from the New York Times on Boulder.
Watched the documentary “A Map For Saturday” last night, great little film. It’s about a young man who leaves his job in New York City as a TV producer to backpack the world for a year on his own. It documents his travels and encounters with other backpackers. It would be nice someday to take a large amount of time off and buy a Round The World (RTW) airline ticket. The film reminded me of another documentary called “Long Way Round” with Ewan McGregor and his friend Charlie Boorman. In “Long Way Round” the two ride motorcyles around th world, the long way around. This year I plan to go to Europe hopefully twice in the fall when things slow down for work. Rent an apartment for a few weeks at a time and live with the locals.
I was impressed how light the guy in A Map For Saturday packed since most of his gear was for the making of the film. Here is his packing list. I’m not sure if this is the device he used, but it seems like a nifty lock. I’m gonna have to pick up one of these next time I go train traveling. PackSafe w/ Exomesh.
PS. The DVD version is “double” the length of the TV version that aired on MTV. The DVD also has a deleted scenes section.
This is a funny video I found on YouTube about the Downfall of HD DVD. It uses a clip from the movie “Downfall” with Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler. Great movie about the fall of the Third Reich, go check it out sometime. A couple of other German movies to go check out if you haven’t seen them are “Run Lola Run”, “Das Boot” and “The Lives Of Others” Brilliant films 
Have been trying to update the iMac with 10.5.2. It’s been hanging on reboot when running the update, so I’ve just been putting it off. Well today I received Aperture 2 and when I went to install it, Aperture 2 required Mac OS X 10.5.2. So I had to figure out how to install 10.5.2 upgrade without it hanging on reboot. I’m a total newbie to Macs so figuring out stuff is a challenge. I finally found a link to a standalone download for the 10.5.2 upgrade rather than using the “Check For Updates”. The standalone installation of 10.5.2 worked like a charm and I was finally able to reboot the system to 10.5.2.
So now that I have Aperture 2 up and running I need to figure out how to use it. This past year I shot in RAW format in the hopes that I would eventually get a Mac. I’m excited to see what I can do with Aperture 2 and my RAW image files.
I’m in San Diego right now for my dad’s birthday. I flew in last night to surprise him, and boy was he surprised. Today was spent troubleshooting computer problems for m parents. A PC that boots into the BSOD and sometimes doesn’t power up. CMOS was weird, a drive was making a noise and power supply sometimes didn’t run. Could be so many problems. Worked on another PC running Windows 98 with no CD burner. The Windows 98 PC which was running a Pentium II and a 4 GB drive was running pretty fast for that they needed it for. I stole the CD burner from the BSOD PC which is a newer P4 and installed it on the Win98 PC. Downloaded a free CD burner software and showed them how to backup some simple stuff. They had a brand new PC to replace the Win98 system and we set that up, with a nice new 20″ widescreen monitor. Tomorrow I need to transfer all the data from the two PCs to the brand new system, should go well.
Tonight we had Sushi Ota, so good! Here are some bad pics from my phone. Towards the end of the night I stopped taking photos. These are in the reverse order that I ate them.
Crab Head Soup
Tempura - Na No Hana, Shitake, Ebi
Crab Duh!
Sashimi - Shima Aji, Hobo, Japanese Tai, Japanese Blue Fin Toro
Crab wrapped in Cucumber, Tuna Meatballs. Both in Miso Sauce
I received my 24″ 2.8GHz iMac on Friday and I’m loving it The monitor housing is so huge I had to rearrange my furniture so I can see the TV while on the computer. Still getting used to using Mac OS, everything seems to make sense. I have to figure out all the keyboard shortcuts for a Mac, I hate using the mouse. It’s really nice how things just work on a Mac, so far no problems. Rumor has it tomorrow Apple will release an updated Mac Book Pro.
Finally ordered that Mac I’ve been drooling over since it came out, the 24″ iMac 2.8. Yay! Now I just need to figure out how to use Mac OS since the last Apple I owned was in 1988. It was a Mac Plus with a grayscale 9″ screen and 3.5″ floppy. I think I had a SCSI CMS 40 Meg hard drive and a SCSI laser printer. I loved HyperCard back then and I think I used Z Terminal for dialing out. Prior to the Mac Plus I had an Apple II+ with 64Kb, sound card and dual 5.25″ drives. After the II+ I had an Apple IIC. I can still run the Bard’s Tale series , Ultima IV & V, and Wizardry series on the IIC. Man those were some really good games. My favorite had no graphics, but it was the most fun, Telengard. It looks like there is a Telengard version ported for a PC, gonna have to check it out. Good times
UPDATE: Damn! I can’t figure out how to get in full screen DOS mode in Windows Vista to run Telengard. All the better I suppose, I’d probably have wasted several hours killing orcs and finding treasure if it did run.