Dig a little deeper and I find BJ Atchley of Connecticut who plays the Alto Saxophone. Too bad I haven’t picked mine up in 5 years or so.

So my apologies go out to BJ Atchley of CT from whom I will likely steal the first page of google for some time to come.

• Nikon sb-600 flash
• Impact Light Stand
• Light Bracket
• Optical White Umbrella
• Radio flash trigger
• Gaffers Tape
• Clamp

That’s pretty much a single light support system for an off camera lighting setup. I’ll eventually want 4 total of all of the above, except I’ll only need receivers for each additional light. Also after I have at least one flash like the sb-600 that works in ttl mode on my camera I can get the cheaper vivitar 285hv. The vivitars would eventually get replaced by other nikon flashes like the sb-600 or sb-800 though. Oh and I suppose I’ll need a backdrop so I can do some portraiture on the go.

Also you have to throw in a color gel swatchbook with every order. But you also need enough of the basics for color correction as seen here. Also some ball bungies would be nice.

A nice off camera TTL cord would be nice but they’re horribly overpriced. A new camera body can fire them in TTL mode off camera anyway.

Tripod stuff:

• Silk 700 Tripod Legs
• Bogen 488RC2 Ball Head

I suppose I’d need a bag for all or some of this stuff, but a generic canvas bag would do for the lights. A new camera bag is a few lenses off before I’ll need an upgrade. Speaking of lenses I’ve changed my list up a bit. I keep reading too many things about Tamrons having focusing issues so for now my order of lenses will be.

• Sigma 18-50 2.8 HSM
• Tamron 28-75 2.8, Has to be the one with the built in motor.
• Sigma 10-20mm HSM
• Nikon 70-300mm AF-S VR
• Sigma 30mm 1.4 HSM
• Nikon 60mm Micro-Nikkor
• Heck even the Bigma (Sigma 50-500mm HSM) would be great

Any other lenses need a body upgrade for my lowly d40. By the time I’m up for it I’m sure the Nikon d300 will be at a more realistic price.

I know this is insanely boring stuff, but I’m doing it more, to keep track of my upgrade list. It’ll take me years and years to really acquire all this stuff, but if my daughter’s keep getting more beautiful, I’ll have to keep taking more pictures.

Watch the Youtube video after the jump

On Tuesday evening I mowed our lawn for the first time after the seasonal break due to winter. Naturally the first things that begin to grow are weeds. The grass is still browned and dry and will need a few weeks of weed and feed, coercion, and watering to change to a normal green color. We had a lawn service maintaining our lawn for the majority of last year but decided the $100 monthly fee could be better spent on pretty much anything, so we canceled in the off season. In my new excitement to maintain my own lawn I decided I needed/wanted a gas-powered edger/weed eater. Faced with a non-stop 8 months of lawn care, I thought it would be okay to spend $100 or so on a nice gas-powered one so I don’t have to keep replacing spools and messing with the cord on our electric whacker. My inspiration was a 2-stroke weed eater my parents had given us that after 10 years of use didn’t seem to work. I couldn’t get it to work either. Lowe’s and back again, I opened and began using my foliage flagellator after scalping and bagging the grass with the lawn-mower.

I didn’t wear a mask.

I didn’t wear a mask.

I’m a moron.

My wife told me to wear one and I believed her to be too fastidious in her fear for my frail resistance to pollen and life in general. Usually I can take a benadryl afterwards and be dandy by the time it wears off. It wore off at about 4:00am. At which point I could only breathe in short gasps, and had a layer of phlegm blocking my airway. Chest wracking coughs weren’t possible because I couldn’t draw in the air or spare the breath. After about 15 minutes of deterioration and struggle with breathing I decided this situation needed drastic measures. Either I drink a bunch of benadryl or I go to the hospital. I decided to slam some children’s benadryl like I was a parachuting snowboarder playing halo drinking mountain dew. I drank about 80-100 ml of it. It took about 5-10 minutes to kick in and did it ever kick in. I was able to breathe. I don’t remember falling back asleep, I just remembered looking at the clock every minute or so but each time I looked an hour had passed. I turned my alarm off but don’t remember it sounding.

At 9:00am I get a call from my boss on my cell. “Are you in today or not?” he asks. “Outh,” I reply in my best non-slurring voice. I then explain what had happened while wobbling on my feet, at least this is what my brain remembers. “Well, the meeting on the zone project database is today.” “Uh, oh,” I had missed the first meeting in Austin due to an extremely sick rest of the family, and really didn’t want to miss this one. I had remembered the meeting and even set my alarm for the appropriate time to show up with plenty of time to spare. You know, the alarm I had turned off in an anti-histamine stupor. In the middle of a benadryl bender I had completely forgotten. My boss and another associate from the Austin office had flown in to Dallas just to make this meeting. I didn’t want to skip out a second time when the company had paid airfare for some others to be in my home office. I thought for a heartbeat, I’ll just shower then drive there. Um, yeah. Heather drove me to work. I could hardly walk straight. I sat in the meeting and actually contributed, even though it was against my own better judgment, cause I honestly can’t keep my mouth shut in design/planning meetings.

The meeting went well and I managed to not look like too big of an idiot. The benadryl started to wear off at about 12:30 and was completely gone about 3 hours later… although I have a rash on my neck now. There’s something in my yard that hates me and I return the sentiment. Next time I wear a mask.

Like everyone in Britain I have long been a huge fan of the television show Top Gear, although we get it only sporadically here in America. You can find it on BBC America and occasionally it pops up at odd times on other cable channels. There have been rumours circulating that the show would eventually come to America. I hoped it would come with Jeremy Clarkson and the gang, but NBC seems to have bought the show and I got a call one day asking if I would be interested in being a part of it.

I do my show full time, and these programmes take a great amount of time to make, so right away I had my concerns about fitting it in. The general rule of television is that it takes an hour for every minute that you see on screen. My other fear is that the show will not be made by car people.

So someone calls me from the network and is clearly not a car person. He says: “You like cars, right?” I say yes. “Like, all kinds of cars?” Well, yes. I like all kinds of cars. Why? “Well, the network has bought the TV show . . . um . . . High Gear? Top Gear? Top Gear! Top Gear, yes. We know you like to build cars.”

I ask: what’s the plan for the show? “Well, like, one week you build a car that flies and the next week you make a car that goes under water.” So I said: you know you can’t build these things in a week.

In my mind I can just see Jeremy lambasting Americans for what they did to his show. So I think: I’ve got to run away from this as quickly as I can. So I tell him that, as much as I like the show, I try not to make my hobby my job.

I like the show just the way it is. Jeremy and the guys are extremely talented, so maybe it would be an idea to do an American show similar to Top Gear but not with the same name, because I think it would be impossible to recreate or live up to the standards of the British show.

Another problem for Top Gear in America is the biting humour and criticisms of the cars. My great fear in America is that, for instance, if Kia was our sponsor this week, we’d have to say the car was fantastic.

I said on The Tonight Show recently that the new Kia was available with a heated rear window, so if people needed to push it in winter they could keep their hands warm. Boy, the phones did not stop ringing. So imagine what Jeremy would have to put up with.

I don’t think you could be quite as freewheeling with your opinions as you can on the BBC, because sponsors pay for the programmes. Sponsors would be unlikely to embrace any criticism.

Americans don’t really see personalities like Jeremy on commercial television. They know that they have to be somewhat watered down. When Jeremy rips into some sponsor such as Ford or Chrysler, well, that’s the last time they sponsor that show. Then what you have is “the meeting” after the show, where they tell him to tone it down. That’s just not what they do at Top Gear.

Some British shows translate quite well here - The Office, for example. But with Top Gear I have such respect for the original show, I feel if they asked me to do it I would be a pale imitation of Jeremy.

It would have to be something completely different, coming from a different angle. But when you see something that’s sort of perfect as it is, it’s difficult. Are you outright stealing, trying to imitate? What are you doing? I would prefer to do a different show rather than try to copy something that works so well already.

Cars are my hobby. Television is my job. When you make your hobby your job it becomes a whole different thing. For me, my great release from any sort of pressure is to go to my garage.

I have a friend who was an attorney but always wanted to open a hot-dog stand. So he opened a hot-dog stand and it was doing okay. Then he opened one on the other side of town and that was doing okay but never really did well. Then he ran between the hot-dog stands and the law practice and he lost all three of them.

So I go to my garage and I shoot my web pieces (see www.jaylenosgarage.com) and we talk about the cars. I do it for free - there’s no money in it. We just passed 27m hits, so it’s quite popular, and that’s what I like to do. It’s great fun because it’s like sitting with a bunch of car friends. I don’t want it to be my job.

I’ve added the rss feed to the sidebar, and a link to the little dynamic site that google makes.

This has helped distract me from the weird political pastor/politician insanity that seems to be spreading. As long as we can roll religion, race, politics, and government largess into a single beautiful soundbyte, then we’re still in the US.

Anyway, Slysoft’s AnyDVD HD has done it.

In the absence of mandatory managed copy, or the absence of a proper implementation that would allow a server based disc-less movie browsing and playback, this is huge news for the do-it yourself home theater PC crowd. This means that for the foreseeable future you will be able to rip Blu-Rays to your hard drive and stream them over your home network.

The only drawback is that it is not open-source. Proper litigation could limit the spread of the software. We won’t have a major media coup on the level of DeCSS. Slysoft has been doing this for years though and we’re probably reasonably safe from them just up and disappearing one day.

You can read the Slysoft press release after the jump.

For Immediate Release

Antigua, West Indies - March, 19th 2008

AnyDVD HD now with BD+ support

Film studios that have switched to Blu-ray may have crowed a little
too early because the much-praised BD+ copy protection is an ad
absurdum affair now, too. With today’s release of version 6.4.0.0 of
AnyDVD HD it is now also possible to make backup security copies of
Blu-ray discs protected with BD+.

Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group will have to revise his
statement from July, 2007 regarding BD+: “BD+, unlike AACS which
suffered a partial hack last year, won’t likely be breached for 10
years”. It is worth mentioning that since he made that statement only
eight months have gone by.

Peer van Heuen, head of High-Definition technologies at SlySoft adds:
“Admittedly, we are not really so fast with this because actually we
had intended to publish this release already in December as promised.
However, it was decided for strategic reasons to wait a bit for the
outcome of the “format war” between HD DVD and Blu-ray. On top of
that, we first wanted to see our assumptions confirmed about the in
the meantime released BD+ titles regarding the BD+ Virtual Machine. We
are rather proud to have brought back to earth the highly-praised and
previously “unbreakable” BD+. However, we must also admit that the
Blu-ray titles released up to now have not fully exploited the
possibilities of BD+. Future releases will undoubtedly have a modified
and more polished BD+ protection, but we are well prepared for this
and await the coming developments rather relaxed”. Van Heuen adds
jokingly: “The worst-case scenario then is our boss locks us up with
only bread and water in the company dungeon for three months until we
are successful again”.

Giancarlo Bettini, SlySoft CEO, adds, “We are convinced that today’s
release will give the high-density market new impulse. It remains
unclear just what direction this will take. On the one hand, it can
give Blu-ray a boost because the end-user has the certainty in knowing
now that a backup security copy can also be made from Blu-ray disks
protected by BD+. On the other hand, one or more film studios may want
to reconsider their withdrawal from HD DVD and Toshiba could also
grant the high-density DVD a reprieve. HD DVD certainly deserves a
second chance, particularly since HD DVD hardware has obtained a
higher market share within the last months than its BD counterpart
from SONY. In any event, I wish all those involved a happy Easter from
the bottom of my heart.”

There’s a couple dozen more after the jump.