Face Off Against Cancer 2008 Photos

On Saturday the 13th of September, 2008, I attended Memory Foundation’s Face-Off Against Cancer, a hockey tournament held in Chestermere that raises money for malignant melanoma research and support for families impacted by it. This year the tournament was held in Crystal Violante’s honour, my friend who passed away from cancer last year. They already had an event photographer, but I decided to bring along my Nikon D300 and Canon HF100 HD video camera and do my best to capture the memories for the people playing on Crystal’s Shooting Stars, the team created in her honour. Ashley set a personal goal of $2000 for fund-raising, and she managed to hit $2935 thanks to great support from our friends and family. Thanks to everyone that donated! The full album can be viewed on my photo site.

Place of Rescue Fundraiser 2008 Photos

On September the 12th, 2008, there was a fundraiser held at RockPointe Church for Place of Rescue, a Cambodian orphanage for victims of AIDS. Country music artist Paul Brandt, joined by his wife Liz, played an acoustic set as part of the evening, which also included silent and live auctions. Over $100,000 was raised for Place of Rescue that evening; the generosity of the people who attended was touching. From a photography point of view, I enjoyed myself, though it was hard to get the pictures I wanted of Paul Brandt while trying to avoid blocking other people’s view. One of the things I need to do more of as a photographer is to take risks to get great shots.

When You Accept Money for a Job…

…you’d better be professional and deliver professional results. Over the past few days we’ve been putting the final pieces in place in a home renovation project, and I’m getting increasingly frustrated the more I discover about the errors one of our contractors made. There’s nothing worse than trusting someone to do a job for you and finding out that they cut corners, didn’t install what they said they’d installed, and generally rushed the project. Doesn’t anyone care about their professional reputation any more? You’d think in this Internet era they would…

Kijiji: What’s the Etiquette Here?

Over the past six months, I’ve been using eBay less and using Kijiji more. I’ve found that eBay is increasingly a home for professional sellers, with jacked up shipping prices, fixed “Buy It Now” selling prices instead of bidding, and it’s hard to search for anything without finding endless listings of knock-off accessories and bundles instead of the product you’re really searching for. Then there’s the whole feedback thing, where I’ve been hit with negative feedback from sellers when I’ve complained to them about their shoddy selling practices. The feedback issue has been largely fixed, but somehow when I browse eBay now I feel like something has gone horribly wrong with it.

Kijiji on the other hand, which interestingly enough is an eBay company, is a completely difference experience. It was created to compete with Craigslist. I’ve never actually used Craiglist for anything, largely because I didn’t realize until last year that it was available for use outside the USA. I personally find it extremely ugly, like a DOS BBS from 15 years ago. At any rate, Kijiji looks great, is a fast site, and works really well. I’ve sold a few things on it, but I’m still pretty new at it.

And so we come to the question: what’s the ettiquette for selling things via classified ads when it comes to fielding multiple inquiries? Last month I was selling a Samsung CDMA mobile phone – it was a few years old, and I just wated to get rid of it, so it was at a fire-sale price of $10. I had six inquiries, one person even wanted me to ship it across Canada to them. One woman said she’d show up to look at it, but never did, and I ended up selling it to another person. The point is, I considered it un-sold until I had the money in my hands. I think of Kijiji like a one-item garage sale – the first person to pay for it, gets it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was selling a motherboard + CPU, and it went much like the sale of the phone: several inquiries, and on Thursday afternoon one guy wanted to come see it on a Friday morning, with the intention of purchasing it. As I was exchaning email messages with him, another guy called and said he’d come and buy it on Thursday night. I didn’t tell the Friday morning guy it was sold, because it wasn’t yet, and for all I knew the Thursday night guy wasn’t going to show up. He did show up, and after I sold him the motherboard + CPU, I immediately emailed the Friday morning guy and told him the products were sold. Friday morning guy got quite irate with me, claming that I wasn’t being fair to him; that he had already re-arranged his schedule to come and pick up the motherboard + CPU, and I shouldn’t have sold it to someone else.

So what’s the proper etiquette when selling items via classified ads – do you stop selling it and pull the ad when someone says they’re going to come buy it? Or is it first come, first serve – the first person to show up with the money gets it? Did I wrong Friday morning guy by not selling it to him?

I Guess I Still Need to Price Shop…

It’s funny, when it comes to buying technology, I rarely if ever “shop around” because most stores will sell the same product for the same MSRP, or close enough that it doesn’t matter. Imagine my surprise today when I decided to see who had a Linksys 802.11n gigabit router in stock, and I saw a 50% price difference in the products! London Drugs had it for $139, Best Buy had it for $149, and Future Shop had it for…$99! There’s no indication that the Future Shop price is a sale price – so there’s a $50 difference in price on a $150 product. I find it highly amusing that the Linksys Web site has been down all day…you’d think a networking company (Cisco) would know how to keep a Web site online. 😉

The 2010 Camaro

So is it totally crazy of Ashley and I to hold onto the Mini Cooper until the spring of 2009, when we can purchase a 2010 Chevy Camaro? This car looks so completely bad-ass, and since I never achieved my dream of buying a Mustang at age 25 (it just didn’t quite work out), this car looks like it might fit the bill of a “fun car”. It’s so bizarre for me to be seriously considering a car that I’ve never driven, but daaaaamn does it look hot!

A Weekend of Shooting: Glorious!

I had a very busy weekend, but it involved a lot of photography and videography, so I had a lot of fun. I hadn’t done any serious photography since early July, and I was really missing it. When I heard that there was a Place of Rescue fundraiser at my church that included a Paul Brandt mini-concert, I asked if they had an event photographer – they didn’t, so I was the guy with the camera on Friday night. I’ll talk more about Paul Brandt when I finish processing the photos, because I got a chance to met him briefly, but I wanted to process one image from each of the events I was part of this weekend. Here’s one of my favourite photos from the concert…

The other event I attended this past weekend was Memory Foundation’s Face-Off Against Cancer, a hockey tournament that raises money for malignant melanoma research and support for families impacted by it. This year the tournament was held in Crystal Violante’s honour, my friend who passed away from cancer last year. They already had an event photographer, but I decided to bring along my Nikon D300 and Canon HF100 HD video camera and do my best to capture the memories for the people playing on Crystal’s Shooting Stars, the team created in her honour. Ashley set a personal goal of $2000 for fund-raising, and she managed to hit $2435 $2935 thanks to great support from our friends and family. Thanks to everyone that donated! Below is one of the images I captured from that event, cropped in a trendy 16:9 aspect ratio. 😉

Canada Isn’t Part of the UK Anymore…Really!

Sometimes I wonder if there’s some sort of conspiracy with software and Web developers when it comes to Canada. We have more in common with the USA than any other country, yet I continuously see defaults that put me at UK settings. For instance, when I purchase Epson printers, the default page size is always A4 – not the typical 8.5 x 11 inch paper we use here. Don’t software developers bother to research the size of paper common in each country? The screen shot above shows me getting the United Kingdom Live Search page. I’m not entirely sure how I got there, because if I open up search.live.com right now I get the Canadian site. Pinnacle’s Web site constantly puts me to their UK site by default. And it’s not uncommon for me to not even see an option for Canada as a locale. I know we’re only a country of 33 million people, but still, it would be nice not to be considered as part of the UK. Someone needs to tell these people we’re not a colony any more. 😉

A Photographic Exploration of Fire, July 2008

At a family reunion in July, I spent some time around a campfire. I hadn’t really photographed fire before now, at least not with any degree of intentionality. I explored a variety of different angles, shutter speeds, and focal lengths as I photographed this constantly moving and changing subject. Because this is an exploration of a singular thing, my normal rules of culling don’t apply. The full gallery is found here.

UFC 91: Randy Couture vs. Brock Lesnar

Wow. That’s just crazy – Brock Lesnar is huge and powerful, but as his last fight with Heath “Crazy Horse” Herring showed, he doesn’t really know how to fight – on or off the ground. Randy Couture on the other hand has a wealth of experience. This is going to be interesting…or really embarrassing for Lesnar. I’m not sure which. Full details with press release here. And this is the first post in my MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) category – I think I might live blog the next UFC event. Might be fun. 🙂