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.