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!
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. 😉
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. 😉
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.
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. 🙂
About a year ago I, posted a facetious request asking the Americans reading my blog to do something to improve their economy. Well, it took a year for the effects of that request to come to fruition, but I’m pleased to say that whatever you all did seems to have worked: today I converted $482 USD into Canadian funds and got $503.74 for it. That’s a 4.51% exchange rate in my favour – it’s not quite up to the 4.9% exchange rate the other way I was complaining about a year ago, but hey, what’s 0.39% between friends? Keep up the good work my American readers – let’s shoot for 10%! Papa needs a brand new bag…and by “new bag” I mean whatever gadget I happen to need next. Like an MSI Wind in black with a 6-cell battery…
[Turn your speakers down before hitting play, the recorded this with hideously over-driven audio]
This past weekend I finished backing up 171.5 GB of data to Mozy, the online backup service that I use. It took a little over a month, and a lot of patience, but it all managed to get up there. So that means that in the case of a catastrophe here at the Dunn house (fire, flood, meteor strike) all of my music, documents, files, photos, and videos are safe and sound up on the Mozy servers. All that protection for $3.89 CAD per month based on a two-year payment. Tough to beat! Now I just have to make sure Ashley and I aren’t at home when that meteor strike happens…
UPDATE: Mozy alienated me as a customer when they tried to raise my rates by 1390% and now I don’t recommend them to anyone. No, that’s not a typo. I now use Crashplan.
The Watchmen was an absolutely superb 12-part comic book series that ran from 1986 to 1987, and I had no idea they were making it into a movie until I was in the movie theatres watching The Dark Knight and the trailer came on. The trailer gave me shivers – the cinematography is breathtaking, and the music they picked (Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins) sent shivers up my spine. No surprises there: it’s from the director of 300. The comic book series was a wild, sprawling tale that had great depth, so I’m really interested to see if they can condense it into a two-hour movie and have it still make sense.
There’s not much up at the official movie site, but they do offer HD downloads of the trailer. I downloaded the 1080p WMV trailer, put it on my Windows Home Server, and played it back on my Xbox 360 attached to my TV. One word: wow. It looked fantastic! There’s also a 720p trailer if your computer chokes on the 1080p.
I’m an old-school coming book geek. I started collecting real comics when I was 11 years old (Archie comics prior to that don’t count), my first series being The ‘Nam. From there it was Blue Beetle, X-Men, Spiderman, Wolverine, and on and on. I stopped actively collecting comics when I was 20 or so – I found I needed my money for other things and, in particular, I found it difficult to keep up with the cross-over series and spin-off series. I grew frustrated with how Marvel and DC seemed greedy, not content with having me collect one series about a certain character or group of characters. I still purchase about half a dozen graphic novels a year, but no longer collect a monthly comic book. I’d enjoy reading a regular series, but like any serial publication, it’s hard to come in mid-stream when you feel like you’ve missed everything prior. The point here though is that, since being a child, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of super heroes with super powers doing great deeds to keep the world safe.
This leads me into the actual point of this post: because I’m a “comic book guy” (though, thankfully, not as fat as the guy on the Simpsons) I’ve been playing City of Heroes (COH) for a few years now. When it first came out in 2004 I played it with a friend for perhaps a year and a half, then I stopped playing for a couple of years – and came back to playing it one or two times a week for the past year or so. It’s now a Sunday ritual for me; 12pm to 5pm, I’m relaxing and playing City of Heroes with four other friends online. COH is the first MMORPG I’ve found that’s really held my attention, because it’s really fun.
I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons Online, but quit that after a few months because it was virtually impossible to team up with other players (the servers were teaming with people that didn’t want to team up) and the missions were virtually impossible to accomplish alone. I’ve played a bit of World of Warcraft, but for whatever reason it didn’t “click” with me – it might have been the exaggerated comic-book style graphics, or the complex gameplay, or maybe it was just because everyone else in the world was playing it. Guild Wars was also a game I played for a few months, but I hated the ingredients-based system where you had to make everything cool instead of finding it in a treasure horde. I’m an semi-old-school Dungeons and Dragons gamer (the real old-school guys started with this), having bought the Red Box Edition (wow does that site bring back some memories!) with my allowance when I was about 12 years old, and I come from the school of thought that heroes should be out slaying orcs and trolls, not collecting ingredients like Mother Hubbard to make a potion. That’s so lame, and it’s just a mechanism put in place by the game creators to stretch out the time you have to spend online in their game. The only ingredients-based system that was ever really cool was found in the Ultima games (where did I put that mandrake root anyway?).
Back to the point of this post however: DC Universe Online…this looks amazing! As much as I enjoy City of Heroes, the graphics are looking pretty aged, and I haven’t heard a peep about a new version of the game with a new graphics engine. Although I usually avoid anything with Sony’s name on it, the preview video looks amazingly cool. This might be the game that I switch to when it comes out – though it depends on a bunch of things, such as the game play and the mechanics of the game. I can’t believe that Marvel cancelled their Marvel Universe Online game – done properly, that could have been amazing. I guess they’re too focused on making movies to make a game as well. At any rate, I guess I’d better start my work day now… 😉