Travis Pettijohn: Blog

After the first drive in my old file server died, I made a backup of all of my photos...or so I had thought. But actually, I didn't get them all. For some reason NONE of my Africa pictures got backed up!! YIKES. I discovered this tonight when I wanted the original image for the header on this web site. I checked the original card in my camera, my external hard drive..., the copy I had made on the new file server...nothing. A few minutes later I remembered that I had at one time burned other copies: one I sent to my Dad so he could view a slideshow on his DVD player, and another that I kept for myself. Thankfully, I found my copy in my "box 'o pictures" and have recovered all of the photos...PHEW.

It goes to show you: even when you make a backup (or even when you have an implicit backup with a RAID), you could make a mistake and unknowingly miss something. Be proactive in making backups, ESPECIALLY with irreplaceable things like photographs.

I would have been a sad little boy if I had lost all of those pictures. Imagine how it would make you feel if you lost all of those digital photos you have of your kids/grandkids/friends/whatever. Consider even burning another copy and sending the CD/DVD to someone else.

(Now that this blog is online, I may devote some time to that Amazon S3 application I've been wanting to write for encrypted off-site backups.)

I just got back from running The Relay out in California. It's an intense, sleepless, 199-mile, 12-person relay race over about 36 hours from Calistoga to Santa Cruz. Everybody runs three legs (well, sometimes some people run extra legs) of about 5 to 7 miles each. At the end of the race, I was talking to a couple of other runners. They had both run marathons in the past and they were talking about how this race requires a whole different kind of endurance. Funny stuff. I know that I could not go out and run a marathon tomorrow (maybe next year?), but it made me smile to hear a marathoner talk about how challenging this race is.

Overall, I had a blast. I was there with great people, and the constant activity meant we never had a chance to get bored or annoyed with each other :) I plan on doing this again next year!

Here are my pictures from the event. To give you an idea of how intense this was, here's a timeline from when I woke up on Friday morning to when I went to bed on Monday morning.

Friday 6:00am CDT, Wake.
7:00, Out the door to ORD.
12:15pm PDT, Arrive at SFO, pick up vans, head north to Napa.
3:00, Arrive in Napa, eat dinner, buy groceries.
8:00, Team meeting, plan directions for the next day.
9:30, In bed.

Saturday 5:20am, Wake.
6:00, On the road to the starting line in Calistoga.
8:00, Race starts, Zach runs leg 1.
8:20, Van gives Zach water at mile 2.
8:45, My leg (leg 2) starts.
9:05, Van gives me water at mile 2.
9:30, Jan runs an extra leg.
10:15, Ghost runner runs (in other words, we chill out and wait 45 minutes).
11:00, Sarah runs, we hand her water at 2 miles (this pattern continues).
11:45, Jan runs his second leg ("I came here to run, so I am going to run.")
12:30pm, Van exchange. Jan finishes his leg (6) and hands off to Adam to start off Van 2. We (Van 1) chill out at the exchange point, eat, lay in the sun, try to sleep.

6:00pm, Van exchange. Nellie from Van 2 hands off to Zach from Van 1, I run, Jan runs an extra leg, ghost runner, Sarah, Jan runs his assigned leg.
Sunday 12:30am, Van exchange. Jan hands to Adam on the south side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Jan just ran across the bridge at midnight under a full moon. He raved about it.
1:00, Van 1 arrives at our hotel in downtown San Francisco.
1:30, Everyone has showered and is asleep.

4:00, Everyone is awake.
4:30, Van 1 is on the road to the next van exchange.
5:30, Arrive at van exchange.
5:45, Nellie hands to Zach. Then I run (boy was I in pain; my legs felt like stilts and it took me 3 miles just to warm up). Ghost runner (Jan didn't run an extra leg...slacker), ghost runner, Sarah, Jan.
10:30, Van exchange.
11:15, Van 1 arrives in Santa Cruz, we have brunch (so good and necessary) and then go to the beach to wait for van 2. I fall asleep on a bench on the boardwalk. The water is freezing, but feels really really good on my sore feet.
3:15pm, Van 2 arrives in Santa Cruz.
3:45, Nellie and the group crosses the finish line.
4:15, Both vans are back on the road to SFO.
5:15, I'm checked into my flight at SFO, but am too early to check my bag. So I take the tram to the International terminal where there is a food court and I open a beer. I'm too tired to read, so I send some emails and texts from my phone to pass the time.
7:30, I'm through security. I chill out with another beer and some sushi. Still too tired to read. Try talking to a girl who is also alone with a drink and get shot down.
10:45, Board flight, fall asleep before we even leave the gate.

5:15am CDT, Arrive ORD. Get bags, struggle to stay awake on the L so I don't miss my stop. I definitely fell asleep on the bus that I transfered to, but wasn't worried because I was going to the second-to-last stop.
7:15, At home. Take a shower.
8:00, Asleep.
11:00, Alarm goes off, snooze until..
11:45, Hobble out of bed, run errands, sort through my pictures, go about my day.
9:30pm, Asleep.

I guess it's a celebrity week for me. I was at Elephant & Castle last night. After a few rounds, I tried talking to this random girl. She told me she worked at Fox News and then I realized that the guy she was sitting next to was Mark Suppelsa. So I got a picture. She didn't like being included in the shot, so she quickly exited the frame. Too bad.

I went to San Francisco last weekend to visit some friends, Chris and Katie, that moved out there this past spring. It was a short trip. I flew in Friday (arrived around 5pm), and flew out Sunday mid-afternoon. All in all it was a great trip. I ate at a few great restaurants (Greens was my favorite of the weekend, though the quality of the sushi I ate on Saturday was bordering on life-changing). On Saturday, we took a self-guided walking tour. Along Haight street, up Buena Vista Park, bus over to Fisherman's Warf, walking around Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill/Coit Tower, Washington Square Park. It was a great day, and I'm looking forward to my next visit! See my pictures.

A few months ago, I turned on my D70 and the little green disk activity light blinked, blinked, blinked, and kept blinking until the battery died. I couldn't get into the menus, either, because every time the menu blinked, the device reset. There was pretty much nothing I could do. At first I thought the microdrive had failed (it is a spinning hard drive, after all). But replacing it for a solid state CF card disproved that theory.

Since then, I've had "call Nikon" on various TODO lists, but it always made me kind of sick to think that I had to send the camera in for service. Well, today I decided to actually do the first step of that TODO—find the number to call.

Lo and behold, I added "d70" to one of my Google queries (not just "nikon service") and found a service advisory. Apparently this is a known issue, and for whatever reason, they're offering "complimentary service." Sweet! (Sweet relatively speaking, since I'd rather not have any problems.) Good to know they stand behind their products.

In other camera news, I recently ordered the Canon SD700IS. I have the D70 (or, will have it again soon) and a crappy camera on my phone. I've wanted a pocket-sized point-and-shoot model for social shots, etc, when I don't want or need the quality of the D70. I should get it tomorrow!

I bought a real Christmas tree last night, a 6ft balsam fir. It smells awesome. I decorated it and my apartment today. I got some LED lights at Target for the tree. Low power, low heat, long life. Nice. I figured that if I was gonna do something as metro as decorate my apartment, I might as well do something techy to try and balance it out. I also made an angel out of aluminum foil. Pictures.

I finally got my pictures from the 2005 Chicago Air and Water show online. I took them from the fire escape of my apartment. The shot of the F-15 with contrails trailing off of the wing tips like thread from a spool is one of my all time favorites.

I spent last week in Seattle for a training program that Avanade sends all new hires to called QuickStart. The week was a ton of fun! I met some really great people from all over the world, including the UK, Germany, Spain and Canada. Plus people from all over the US.

View my pictures from the week!

I flew in Sunday morning so that I'd have time to do some sightseeing. I wandered around and found some random cafe for lunch and had a falafel sandwich. Then I went on the Underground Tour. Seattle was built on a flood plain, so twice a day when the tide came in there were serious sewage issues (if you flushed while the tide was in, the toilets flushed up). They backfilled the entire area, making the old first stories of the building underground. What you see now as the first story is actually the original second story.

After that I wandered around Pike Place Market and took in the sights, including the Original Starbucks (the logo is a bit more revealing there). I bought some fresh fruit and watched the dudes throw fish around.

Class began on Monday. The focus of the training is on how to be a good consultant: meeting skills, questioning skills, assessing risk, stuff like that. That evening I had dinner at Marco's Supperclub and had an amazing tuna dish.

Tuesday after class we had a team building event at Blue Ribbon Cooking School. Beer and wine provided while you cook under the guidance of professional chefs. This was a great time! Afterwards a few of us went to a pool hall and kept the night going.

After class Wednesday, about a dozen of us went to the international district (the PC way of saying Chinatown) for dinner. Followed by bubble tea and a round of beers (African Amber) back at the Edgewater Hotel (where Avanade put us up for the week).

Thursday was our last day of class. Afterwards thirteen of us went out for sushi. Talk about a great mix of cultures! Japanese food and people from all over Europe and North America. Some beer, some sakegood times! Then we went to the Seattle Mariners baseball game. What's more American than baseball? Of the thirteen of us, only three were American. When the international folks started asking me about the rules (How many tries does he get? What are those lines for? So a foul ball is only a strike sometimes? Don't those people die from boredom standing there waiting for a ball to get hit?), I realized how convoluted baseball is. It's such a simple premise with a huge pile of rules.

After the game we went to a bar called Cowgirls Inc. You know the movie Coyote Ugly? It's like that. Bartenders dancing on the bar. Drinks and dancing made for a good time.

The week was great! I'm glad I got to know so many fun people, and I'm feeling inspired to be part of this organization.

After uploading a few photos to Flickr and realizing how quickly that 10MB/month upload quota was going away, I realized that I would have to resize my photos before uploading them. So, rather than crack open Photoshop, I did what any other programmer would do. I wrote a program to resize and upload for me. It's actually pretty sweet and quite functional. Check it out if you have a (free) Flickr account.

You should know: The error handling is pretty thin. It preserves EXIF! It won't save your login/password (not necessarily bad). It's multithreaded; I think you'll like it. I'm actually happy with the architecture! I wrote it in one evening.

View a screenshot.
Download version 0.9 for .NET 1.1.

(Sorry, Tim.)

Edit 2005-02-12 16:30: New version, 0.9. Better error handling, supports drag-and-drop, saves login/password if desired (Base64 encoded in "HKCU\Software\Pettijohn.com\FlickrShrink"; not really secure, but obfuscated a bit), remembers last folder you added files from, creates thumbnail in a background thread (gives a nice UX when you select amongst items in the upload queue), mores little fixes.

Meijer offers a service called Print @ Store from Home. You download their software (which has a terrible interface), pick your photos, select your print sizes, submit the order, and then go to the store and pick up your prints. It's a pretty good idea, I must say. And for $0.20 4x6 inch prints, it made for a pretty good experience.

This weekend, I spent time with my family for an early Father's Day celebration. Here's my step-nephew, Jack. I should mention that my sister made it officially know this weekend that she's expecting. I'll be a "real" uncle around Christmas time! Near the end of the night, a few of us sat around a fire.

Today I cut into a PureHeart seedless watermelon. It's great. It's a honeydew-sized watermelon with more meat and less rind. Official homepage.

We've had some crazy weather today with plenty of thunder and lightning. Lightning is incredibly hard to capture on film. I only got this one picture.

After a week in San Diego, I decided that my 18-70mm lens wasn't quite enough for me. I want to be able to get even closer to safari subjects...without endangering my life. I set out to get a new lens. I found Ken Rockwell's site, and he reviews (and uses) Nikon lenses. He spoke favorably of the Nikon 75-300mm f/4.5-5.6 lens. I like that the lens is mostly made from metal (not plastic like most newer lenses). As someone who is used to how rapidly computer technology becomes obsolete, I'm fascinated that this lens, which was introduced in 1989 (and discontinued in 1999), works with my camera. In fact, it supports every function except 3-D matrix metering (but supports color matrix metering).

I won an auction on eBay to get this lens. I think I got a good price. I actually computed the average price of all of the (still visible) completed auctions for this lens and made sure I paid less than the average. I got it today.

I took an extended lunch to meet the UPS guy. At about 1:20, the truck pulled up. I was sitting there waiting and, ten minutes later, the truck pulled away. I was thinking to myself, Is this a joke? I check out the tracking online and it said that the package couldn't be delivered because no apartment number was specified. What the hell. I looked at what I sent them and, sure enough, my apartment was given. I put on my shoes, grabbed a pop and left to go back to work. But just for the fun of it, I decided to drive around a little bit and see if I could catch the UPS guy. I went around the next block, and as I was heading back up a street (completing a U), I saw a UPS truck stopped and delivering a package to some house. I put the car in reverse and then headed down to meet the UPS guy. As he walked back to his truck, I asked him if he had just been unable to deliver a package because there wasn't an apartment. He asked me my name and address. Yeah, he had it. I asked him if he wanted to see my driver's license or anything and he said no, if I knew that much about a package he believed me.

After that debacle, I went to work. When I got home, I was finally able to try it out. Ok...so the subject matter here is pretty boring, but it illustrates the point quite effectively. The top two pictures are at both ends of the lens that came with my camera, the 18-70mm. The bottom two shots are the opposite ends of the new lens. All of these pictures were taken at f/6.3 for 1/1250 of a second. As stated on the image, none of the images were resized, only cropped. If your web browser automatically resizes images, you may want to view it at full size. So far, I'm happy!

Of the 168 photos I took today, I ended up touching up and keeping 14 of them. Check them out! My favorite is the close-up of the clover with the very narrow depth of field. Cool shot. Originals are available; feel free to ask. My fees are reasonable :p