New additions today, Weather, Range

Today I added the Ansel Adams picture of the day in the right hand column and also a new favorite links addition of "The Obama Clock"

The weather was very nice today. Most of the day it was nice and sunny, but still cool in the low 50's. Headed out to the range to practice some. Headed out again tomorrow with a bunch of friends. Should be a blast!

Merry Christmas, Mustang and only in Berkley

First of all, I would like to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas. Here is a bit of joy I snapped last week for you enjoyment.


(click for larger view)


Most of you know that I'm a Mustang guy. I found this on the net and thought I'd share..


'Twas the night before Christmas and in the garage,
There wasn't a trace of a Chevy or a Dodge.

The presents were wrapped and the lights were all lit,
So I figured I'd mess with the Stang for a bit.

I popped the release and I lifted the hood,
When a deep voice behind me said "looks pretty good."

Well, as you can imagine, I turned mighty quick,
And there, by the workbench, stood good ol Saint Nick!

We stood there a bit, not too sure what to say,
Then he said "don't suppose that you'd trade for my sleigh?

I said "no way, Santa" and started to grin,
"But if you've got the time we could go for a spin!"

His round little mouth, all tied up like a bow,
Turned into a smile and he said "hey! Let's go!!"

So as not to disturb all the neighbors' retreat,
We pushed the Mustang quietly into the street,

Then, taking our places to drift down the hill,
I turned on the key and I let the clutch spill.

The sound that erupted took him by surprise,
But he liked it a lot, by the look in his eyes.

With Hoosier`s a' crying and side pipes aglow,
We headed on out where the hot rodders go.

And Santa's grin widened, approaching his ears,
With every up shift, as I went through the gears.

Then he yelled "can't recall when I've felt so alive!",
So I backed off the gas and said "you wanna drive?"

Ol Santa was stunned when I gave him the keys,
When he walked past the headlights he shook at the knees!

Then the big block exploded with side exhaust sound!
Santa let out the clutch and the tires shook the ground!

Power shift into second, again into third!
I sat there just watching, at loss for a word,

Then I heard him exclaim as we blasted from sight,
"Merry Christmas to all...........what a great night!!!"



While working in Berkley, I spied this contraption. Sort of a rolling Obama shrine. Certianly something you would "only see in Berkley!"


(click for larger view)

MIA again, Only in Berkley, and Ide Adobe Days

Well as you can see, I have been missing in action again. Had other things going and just haven't gotten over here to do some updating on what's going on. I have been collecting material for the blog, so I should have some stuff to read here now.



Since I have been working in Berkley (or Bezerkley as many call it) I have gathered some good tales and photos I will share here in my "Only in Berkley" on going posts.

Today, I have a photo of a guy I ran into in Berkley the other day. He seemed like a Kool Kat and was certainly a working man...


(click photo for larger size)


Yesterday, we had our annual Ide Adobe Days. I stopped by to take some photos and get there just before they were finished. I have posted the photos over at my website. You can see them HERE

New lens and New Photos

I purchesed a nedw lens for my camera. It's a Nikon AF 105mm Micro Nikkor. A nice prime lens for macro work. Unfortunatly, it's been cold and foggy here and the micro creatures that I watn to photograph are all in hibernation. It will have to wait until warmer weather I guess.

I did get out to our local shooting club today. It was our end of year dinner and shoot. We also do a Toys for Tots toy drive for local kids. We had about 65 or 70 people out today, which I believe is about 20-25 less than we had last year. All in all, it was a good day after the fog lifted some. A good time was had by all. I took some snapshots a t the event, and you can view them here
TSA end of year shoot and dinner

Weather, Christmas Parade and Thanksgiving

The weather has been un-seasonably warm here. It was around 70 degrees the whole weekend. I'm beginning to wonder if we are going to have a Winter this year...

We had our Christmas parade last night. It was warm and clear, so I decided to go out and snap some photos and see if I could figure out how to shoot the parade without using a flash. I did get some photos without the flash, but some I had to use it. That's okay too as I needed the practice with the SB-600 Nikon Speedlight. It works great! You can view the Photos here. As always, you can view them as a slide show if you scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on "slide show".

www.bigfranksworld.com/frank/events/rbchristmas2008/

We had a nice Thanksgiving. Good food and some time off from work. Unfortunately, I didn't think about taking a photo of the Thanksgiving table fare. Maybe next year...

Sorry, work

Sorry all. I have been MIA for the last while. I had some out of town work and didn't have a chance to add to the blog in awhile. I'll try and work that out in the future.

Back to work, Shoot the moon and crazys

We I have finally gone back to work...sort of. I worked a full week this week, but probably won't next week. We are waiting on materials, but once here, we should be good for awhile. After having more than 5 months off this year, it almost feels funny working a full week.

I got a chance to do show photo work tonight. Thought I would try and learn how to photo the moon. It's not as easy as it would seem, Many, many bad photos later ( like 70-80 ) I finally got one that I liked. Here is the one I like the best...

Taken with the Nikon D50 and 70-300mm Nikor ED lens

I worked in Berkley, Ca. this last week. What and eye opener that city is. They drive like maniacs, and also act like them too. I'm really WAY out of my element there to say the least. Luckily, I spend most of my time there either on the job, or at the motel.

The highlight of the week was getting flipped off by some crazy bull-dyke. A wonderful place indeed!

Thank You and a Question

Thank you veterans for all you do. Godspeed....

Question of the day?

At what point does Liberalism become Socialism?

A slow weekend, pictures and cash in the news

It's been a slow weekend. Not much going on. The weather was bad on Saturday, so not much to do. I did drive down to Corning and visited with David which was nice. Don't get down that way all the much to visit. Last night we had thunder and lightning and rain.



Today, Sunday, the weather was beautiful! I got a chance to drive the Cobra and do some tuning on it. It runs great now that I have the new mass air sensor on it. Soon I can go wide open throttle with it and see what it will really do!



I had taken some photos of the kid next door practicing Mototcross. Wanted to try the shutter priority mode on the Nikon D50. I learned a few things, but the pictures didn't come out too well. Never the less, if you do some post production editing, and apply some suitable filters via ThumbsPlus, you can get some cool abstract pieces. This is the one that I liked. Sort of different from the same old stuff.

In the news... (submitted by Billy Haynes)

Seems a contractor found some old cash in a wall, and it has turned into a crazy story.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081108/ap_on_re_us/house_hidden_money

Fishing, weather and hard drive

Got a chance to head out to the lake today. The weather was great. Nice and sunny. The fishing was good also. Not stunning, but well worth it. We ended up with 6 trout and 1 bass in the boat, and lost almost that many. Any day on the lake is better than one in the house. Here is a photo of my buddy JP and the big fish of the day. 18", 2lb-6oz. Shasta Lake rainbow trout.

Here is the big fish for me today. Not nearly the size of JP's fish...

And of course, the obligatory Mt. Shasta shot. Peeking from behind the lesser hills of the lake.

I didn't have the Nikon D50 today. I shot these with the Sanyo CG6 that goes with me when I'm fishing and hunting. It's a perfect camera for what I use it for. And I don't have to worry about taking the Nikon and hurting it.

Tonight, while going to get my camera in the other room, I managed to get my Maxtor 500 gig USB external hard drive's cord wrapped around my my big foot and pulled the drive down to the floor with sufficient force to be felt on the richter scale. I thought for sure it was a gonner. Brand new drive (with tons of files on it) lost. I plugged the USB wire back into it and into the notebook's USB port. To my surprise, the drive booted up and indexed the files and I was able to access it. I guess drive technology, at least as far as durability, has come a long way.

Old Glory, PT 658 and fishing

While up in Redding today, I managed to get some photos of the large flag near Interstate 5. I have always wanted to take some photos of it, and now that I have the D50....Here is one of the shots I took today.

A big thanks to all our vetrans for keeping her flying!

I was sent the link to this video from a friend today. Interesting story. Took these guys 15 years to rebuild her. Amazing!

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-7693407296698216570&hl=en&fs=true

Hope to get out for a couple of hours and do some fishing. I need to get out and have some fun and maybe get this whole election thing out of my head for awhile. With luck, we may have some good fishing photos here tomorrow.

Hmmm

Not much for today. Still reeling from the election results. Still can't imagine that the American people would actually elect a non-military person in war time. Not to mention all the other crap that that went on with him during the election. Maybe I'll get used to it, but I wouldn't bet on it..

Still no work on the Cobra. Bad weather is keeping me from finishing the tune and water/meth injection on it. It needs front brakes, but until I get back to work, that 's a no go.

I shut off my satellite radio a couple of days ago. I miss it already. Not that big a deal. I'll get it back when works pick up. Went 47 years without it before! :)

I was thinking of sending out some photos to get printed, but last time I sent them to Walmart, the 8x10's I had done looked like crap. The smaller 4x6's looked okay, but on the 8x10's, the color was all wrong. I printed out an 8x10 here at home that came out much better than what Walmart did. I don't have a large format printer any longer, so that is about the biggest I can go. While the print looked good from the new HP OfficeJet J6480, I was not that impressed with the Kodak high gloss premium photo paper that I used. It looks good if you view the photo straight on, but at any angle, the paper looks lumpy. I have some HP paper, as well as some Epson photo paper and some Jet Print Matte photo paper. I also have some Georgia Pacific matte photo paper that is 46lb and is really nice, I just haven't tried it yet either.

If any of you have some suggestions on paper you have used that has worked good for you, please let me know. I"m printing high quality color digital photos on it. I would also like to do some black and white work here soon.

So now what?

44 years ago, this puss bag knew the eventuality of it all. Today, 44 years later, the socialists have pulled the wool over enough people's eyes to get into power. It's a sad day for this country...


The Socialist Party candidate for President for the United States, Norman Thomas, said this in a 1944 speech:

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened."

Hp notebook, disapointed and are you ready?

HP



I finished setting up the HP notebook for some friends. It's a nice computer and the first I have used with Windows Vista.

My first impression of the setup were good. Great 17" screen, full number pad, lots of RAM and hard drive space, and the slickness of Vista. For the sale price of $699, I think it was a steal!

While I really like Vista, it seems a bit bloated and slowed this computer down some. I hear it's fairly crash proof, which is more than I can say for XP. I think I will like it on my next computer.

Here is a photo of the notebook. For it's size, it fairly light. So light, it even appears to float!








Disapointed


I reciently re-joined the local builders exchange in Redding so I could get back into bidding some comercial work. I quickly found out that they have an online plan room which is nice for looking at plans that are online only, as well as plans they have in their plan room. Unfortunatly, if you are there and need to look at you saved information in their software, they don't have internet access in their building. This to me seems rediculus! To offer online access, yet not spend $100 for a router so the members can have access when there using the plan room. Come on guys, we pay $400/yr. to me members plus other fees. Spend a buck on a router. You already have net access in the building.


And today, I go there to get some plan copies, and their plan copy machine is down. No "contingency to get plans copied, just "we'll call you when your plans are ready." Unfortunatly, I have to make a 80 mile round trip drive to pick them up, which is like $25 in fuel. Grrrrr.....



Are you ready?



Less than a day left.

More weather, more photos, work

Today we had more rain. The most in one day so far. I still don't have the weather station up, so I'll have to go check on the net to see what we got. Needless to say, it was wet. Didn't get anything done outside. As a matter of fact, didn't go out much at all today..

Still reading and working with the new (to me) Nikon D50. Took some pictures of our friend's dog yesterday. Of the few I took, this is the one I liked the best...

Still loving the camera. It can do so much. I think I'm going to pick a shooting mode and work with it until I learn it, then move to another, working my way down to manual mode. That way I won't be jumping around not really learning anything. I may even take some classes or join a photography club so I can learn from the experienced.

Looks like one more week off, then I should be back to work. I have had 5 months off this year. It's tough to pay the bills with that much time off. Hopefully, work will start and continue through at least the end of the year.

Happy Holloween!

The weather turned colder today with some rain. I didn't get much done except to chase down some plans in Chico for some possible future work, which is always good.



I don't drive the Cobra in the rain, so no progress on that front. I'm sure the drag races will be canceled tomorrow night because of the wet weather. That's a bummer because it's the last race of the season and I was hoping to get some pictures and video of a couple of friends cars on the track. It will have to wait until next year...



I did get to take a few pics in Chico this morning while there. It's such a photographic city, especially when the colors are changing. This is my favorite of the ones I took today.

4 more days until the election. Any comment on who will win?

Here comes the rain again, new equiptment, in the news

It looks like it is actually going to happen. Rain! We haven' t had any in quite some time. though I'm not a big rain fan, we really need it. The lakes here are hurting bad for water. Shasta lake is over 160' below the top and dropping like a rock. Luckly, there are a couple of lakes in the area that never get too far down. You can actually boat in them without hitting shallow objects...

As some of you may know, I like to take pictures. I haven't shot any 35mm film in a long time. I have mostly shot digital photos with either a Kodak EasyShare Z720 (now my wife's camera) and most reciently a Sanyo Xacti cg6 snapshot/video camera.

Well today, that all changes. It's been a long time coming, but I finally stepped up to a digital SLR. A friend and fellow blogger David Louis Harter (http://www.dlhweblog.blogspot.com/) emailed me (thanks Davester!) about a killer deal on a Nikon D50 with tons of gear. I scrimped and scraped and managed to scratch up enough dough to pick up this jem of a camera.

It came with the D50 body, Nikor 18-70mm 1:3.5-4.5g ED lens, Nikor 70-300mm 1:4-5.6d ED lens, Nikon SpeedlightSB-600 accessory flash, 2 Li-Ion battery packs, charger, 2 camera bags, and a Bogen 3205 Professional tripod, as will as software and camera strap. It's a used camera, but was owned by a life long photog and it looks and runs like a new camera. It's only two years old, and since the guy had 10 other digital cameras, it was only used occasionally. I think I'm going to love this camera!

On the car front, I got the new mass air sensor (actually a replacement for the one I had) in the car and am currently tuning it. Once tuned, I will complete the water/methanol injection system and test it. Unfortunately our local drag race track is closing for the season after this weekend, so it may be sometime before I can totally complete the testing. Wish I knew someone with a private air strip I could use...

In the news...

Boy shocked by campaign sign
Thursday, October 30
(updated 2:32 pm)
By The Associated Press
CHAPEL HILL (AP) — Shawn Turschak of Chapel Hill was tired of someone stealing McCain-Palin campaign signs from his yard.
So the man with a degree in electrical engineering hooked up a third sign to a power source for an electric pet fence Monday. Turschak also put up a surveillance camera.
The News & Observer of Raleigh reports that Tuesday, a 9-year-old boy with an Obama-Biden sign grabbed the McCain-Palin sign and got a jolt.
The boy's father, Andrew Noble, then showed up at the Turschak's door, upset his son had been shocked. Soon an Orange County sheriff's deputy also showed up at the Turschak's home.
Noble says his son just wanted to see how the sign was put together. Turschak says the boy intended to swap out the signs.

Sheriff Lindy Pendergrass said he doesn't plan to file charges.

Watch the video...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBcasl2b0Ug

Another day

Sorry all, I got busy yesterday and didn't make it over here to post.

Well it looks like another typical day for me. The norm has been no work. I have had about 5 months off this year. And with the ecomony in the dumps, there is no end in site in the near future. Thinking about taking a job in another line of work until the construction trade gets back on it's feet...

It seems the government isn't doing anything to help the econony out either. They are willing to spend $700+ billion, but not to help the average joe. More pocket lining, less help for the average person. Certianly Joe the Plumber was right...


Yesterday I worked on the Cobra for awhile. And today I will finish up what I started which was the install of the water/methanol injection system and the re-installation of the mass air sensor. That will get me back on the road for now. I need to do the front brakes, and already have the parts, but need to get the rotors turned, and that is money I can't spend right now. If you haven't ever seen my Mustang Cobra, here is a pic of it.



1993 Mustang Cobra 1of 4993 made

I have been cleaning up my notebook computer. It was so full of unused programs and "stuff", that it was almost unusable. I pulled over 5 gigs of programs off of it, and defragged. That made a big difference in the speed. And since I use it instead of my desktop now, I need it to run right.
My desktop computer lost a 7 port powered USB hub the other day. It was a Belkin. This is the 2nd Belkin item I have had go bad in the last year or so. I will not buy from them again.

Getting ready to add some more photos to my webpage of when we went to PINKS all out at Infinion Raceway, and some from a car show that I went to in Stockton a couple of weeks ago. I have been also asked to post some fishing and hunting pics pictures and I will get to that as time permits. For now, here is my last big catch...




42# California Hallibut, SF Bay

First Post

Well I did it! I finally got around to getting a blog up and running.

Since work is slow this year (and the economy is in the toilet) I may have time to spend on this and my web page I just put up. You may not see new post every day, but I'll try.

Mostly what you will find here are my random thoughts and opinions. Maybe even some useful information on occasion. I will be adding features to the blog as time permits, so check back often, and please post comments if you have time.

Today, I am working on my 1993 Mustang Cobra. I'm getting ready to install a water/methanol injection system. It works by injecting a 50/50 water/methanol solution just before the blower, which will cool down the air charge, and up the octane from 91 to around 115 octane. Since the car has a twin screw blower on it (Kenne Bell) I need some help staving off detonation. Once I get it installed, I will write a review on the system and post it on my website.

Thanks for looking...