This year’s NCSU FOSS Fair is scheduled for Saturday, February 9th, 2013, on Centennial Campus. If you have any interest in Free and Open Source Software, this is right up your alley. It’s a unconference styled event, so attendees are encouraged to give sessions, setup demos, and hack on code during the event. RedHat is sponsoring the event, so if you register by the 1st of February, lunch will be provided.

Starbucks has released a special edition stainless steel gift card. With an asking price of $450 USD, and a limited production run of 5,000 units, you’d think they were loaded with special privileges or lifetime discounts. Nope. They have $400 of credit loaded on them and come with a year’s membership in the Starbucks Gold Rewards program.

Where do I begin?

First and foremost, who buys a gift card so they can pay %12.5 more for their coffee than they would if they were paying with cash? The $50 production cost argument is crap: this is a prestige product – and unless Starbucks is paying as much for steel as they charge customers for drop coffee – the $50 production cost claim is stupidity at it’s finest. Speaking of the people who bought this card, it represents the height of stupidity to pay more for something than everyone else does for no apparent benefit. And apparently they sold out in minutes and are going for up to $1,000 on Ebay.

Second, Starbucks apparently now makes you earn your way into their customer loyalty program. It’s not bad enough that they know that you buy a Venti Triple No-Fat Soy Pumpkin Spice Latte between 7:15 and 7:45 AM every other Thursday from October 1st to February 1st, every year, but they also now make you earn your way into the “12th drink is free” punch card program that pretty much every other vendor on the planet does at this point. This card comes with a year of that program. If you’re enough of a Starbucks drinker to buy $400 of coffee for $450, you’d think this program would be free for life (or at least the life of the card). Nope. Just 12 months until you have to buy your way back in.

Third, a real espresso setup for home is cheaper than the gift card. You can get a real espresso machine and a pretty decent burr grinder for $429 (on sale) and still have enough money left over to get a pound and a half of artisan-roasted espresso beans.

The Problem:

Recently, I’ve been trying to do a better job of capturing the wildlife in and around the house. The best times for shooting birds and squirrels is usually when the light isn’t at it’s best – early morning or late evening – and at this time of year, that’s a cold time to be outside. It doesn’t help that animals are skittish about having photographers hanging about at the best of times, and laying in wait in below freezing weather when a warm bed and a pair of rowdy kids inside were calling to me wasn’t going to happen. I decided to use a combination of off-camera flash and remote shutter triggers to help my problems.

Things You Need:

• Flashes
• Flash triggers
• Flags or GoBos
• Wireless shutter release
• Tripod
• Camera/Lens
• Translucent Plastic
• Bird Food
• Patience

I’m a fan of re-using things from around the house, and digging about under the house, I found a sheet of clear perspex and an old light diffuser panel from a ceiling light. I washed both of them off, and found that they were happily scratch-free and mostly unbroken. I grabbed a pair of buckets and headed back outside.

The Setup:

I flipped the buckets upside down, and put the plastic sheets on top of them (the clear one because it was fairly rigid, the diffuser as it would add a little bit of texture). I also dropped a bag of cement on one side, to keep squirrels from knocking the whole setup over.

Next, on the ground, between the buckets, I put my Nikon SB-800 and SB-600 flashes, each set to CLS remote. I also added flags to each flash to keep the light from the flash from spilling back into the camera directly. Flags are also called GoBos, (go-betweens), and they go in between the flash and the camera, to block the light coming from the flash from illuminating parts of the image. Mine are made from cardboard, duct tape, and velcro, and are velcro’ed to each of the flashes.

While we’re on the subject of the flashes, if you don’t have Canon AWS or Nikon CLS, you can use radio triggers, PC sync cords, or simple optical slaves to trigger the flashes. Nikon’s CLS-enabled flashes are spend, but I got them before kids, and it’s incredibly useful to be able to remotely set the power on the flashes. I highly recommend it – especially when it’s 27°F/-3°C outside.

Once I had my stand setup, I poured some bird seed on it, positioned my tripod, and mounted my camera with a Sigma 70-200 f/2.8. The lens was dialed all the way back to 70mm, and it’s the sharpest zoom I own. I also went ahead and set the focus manually to be just at the center of the bird seed, turned the ISO to 400, and set the camera to f/8 and 100th of a second. Finally, I turned the camera from it’s usual “high speed” shutter release mode over to “wireless remote”, and headed inside.

With the magic of CLS, I dialed both flashes down to minimum power – 1/128th power – so I wouldn’t have a risk of running the batteries out. Batteries work less well in the cold, so this is important on cold days.

This setup allowed me to wander around in the house all morning, while were cooking, cleaning and playing with the kids, and snap pictures whenever I saw a creature outside getting a snack. I hope this tutorial helps you get the shots you want. Here is another shot from today’s work, and while the effect is far more subtle, it helped balance the shadows and highlights to produce a useable image:

Goodbye, 1and1 hosting. I’ve finally closed my account with them, which required me calling them on the phone. They wanted me to read my password over the phone to them, which I objected to, and the helpful customer service rep I talked to “waived” that requirement, and confirmed the cancellation. Glad that’s finally done.

I registered this domain, gurucollege.net, 8 years ago today. Happy Birthday! In all seriousness, I’ve been working on a major update to the Guru College and other domains that I own. I’m trying to find a better balance between professional content and personal content, and splitting off into yet another domain seems to be the answer from that. it will allow me to put more family and photography content on this site, which I’d been hesitant to do while this was my primary domain, and polish and refine the professional content on the other site.

So, help: I’m looking for, or will be writing, a simple CMS to handle the professional site. I really don’t think I need to harness the full power of WordPress for what I’m doing, but I also don’t want to manage dozens of files by hand. If it comes to it, I’ll write a theme for WordPress…

dezendorf.net lives again! After all the mess getting the domains moved around, everything is in place in terms of DNS and hosting, and I’ve thrown up a placeholder while I get the site built. I’m using the adaptive images code, as I want this new site to be responsive and not abuse people’s data plans. We’ll see what develops, but it’s going to be slow while I recover from everything else in life.

I’m finally consolidating all of my domains onto A Small Orange. I had never really appreciated how incredibly painful Network Solutions makes it to transfer out of their clutches. My dad setup dezendorf.com and dezendorf.net with them in 2000 – back when domains were actually expensive and somewhat rare to own. Simply due to time issues and hassle, they were left there for years.

Recently, I moved the dezendorf.com domain over to a Google Apps domain, and loved the switch. Real, usable webmail? Yes please! A little while later, my dad wanted to move the dezendorf.com web hosting to something more reasonable, and I told him I’d park it on my ASO account, where I host gurucollege.net and gurufoto.net. They’ve been great to me ever since I bailed out on 1and1, who doesn’t get a link, as they provide crappy, unreliable services for elevated prices.

I took dezendorf.com’s hosting over totally, but I’d left the domain name on Network Solutions, as it was easier at the time, and I figured that I would move it later (once my dad’s hosting plan had run out). Many months later, after lots of ups and downs (life changes, kids, etc), my dad asked me again if I could transfer all the domains over to ASO so he could be done with it once and for all. I realized that Network Solutions was charging him a lot for the services, most of which he didn’t use or really understand. It’s expected – Network Solutions hard-sells you on useless crap you don’t need, because they are all a bunch of scumbags.

Yes, scumbags. Today is November 10th, 2012. I started the process of moving the domains dezendorf.com and dezendorf.net over from Network Solutions to A Small Orange on the 1st of November. They are just now actually transferring. There were hoops after hoops to jump through – the unlock code for the domains, for example, are ONLY emailed to the contact on file. The contact on file is an internal email redirect for NetworkSolutions, which points at your email address. Apparently, if you don’t have an account with NetworkSolutions, the email silently fails to send, and nobody gets notified.

After days of dealing with them, ASO finally got them all sorted out. And they sat on the domains for another 4 days before actually transferring them, at 9:30 AM on a Saturday morning. So now I’m in the process of actually moving everything to the right places and making sure DNS is set correctly. As a side effect of all of this, I’m going to make dezendorf.net an alias to dezendorf.com in terms of email, so [email protected] and [email protected] are synonymous.

TL;DR:

Don’t use Network Solutions for anything. They make it so painful to leave that it’s not worth doing anything with them, ever.