Traveled to Janesville today with Liz, Amber, Callie (Face) and James for a set of pictures in the downtown area.  The day began in Riverside Park in Beloit as just a random outing, and afterward we decided to continue to Janesville.  I chose Janesville hoping I could find some nice junk for a backdrop--and I was quite happy with what I did find.  I shot 835 pictures, 112 of which I saved.  Considering I used bracketing (3 shots in of the same frame but different F-stop biasing), that's a very high save rate--over 40%.  The photoshoot lasted for several hours and the proofing took even longer, but worth it.  In all it was a fantastic shoot and I was very pleased with the results.
    Pictured are James and Face sitting along a random wall.  There were two things I had in mind in setting this shot up.  First: distance.  The subjects are in the middle of the image with nothing on the sides, making them isolated.  The second thing I went for was the hole in the middle of them.  Despite them being next to one an other, the hole acts to separate them.  The texture makes for a gritty picture and one gets the feeling of unease between the subjects.  My thoughts anyway... we'll see what the world thinks (that's a hint to leave comments).

    I finished reading the book River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins.  It's the second full book I've read by Dawkins and as a fellow atheist, humanist and general science fan, I do enjoy reading his work.  I've watched Dawkins in a number of documentaries and interviews and generally agree with his views.  This book focused less on religion and more on science and got into some interesting aspects of Darwinian evolution.  It was rather short though--only running about two hours.
    Pictured is James at Cinco.

    The day after any major gathering is always a little on the slow side.  I believe the last of people (myself included) got to bed around 7:00am.  The evening brought in rain and a fair number of cars were still in the backyard from the night before--so we have a bit of mud now.  But with all the rain, I don't think it will take long to regrow the missing grass.
   Pictured is the first era Garage Crowd; photographer unknown.

    Happy Cinco de Mustache!  This year's 8th annual Cinco gathering took place at the Garage--a smaller venue then in years previous, but none the less fun.  We started off in the morning by firing up the grill and letting the kids run around with boffer swords and followed it up with a long evening of everyone catching up with crowd members they hadn't seen in years.  It was a good turnout and a lot of fun.
    Pictured is the best mustache of the day going out to Zen.

    After playing around quite a bit, I discovered something that should have been obvious. The reason Apache was getting built with the most recent version of OpenSSL was I didn't do a clean build after installing the latest version of OpenSSL  The lesson here: when making a change, always run "make clean" before "make".
    DrQue.net is now running Apache/2.2.8, PHP/5.2.6 and OpenSSL/0.9.8g.

    Are IP address is off the black list. I was actually able to send e-mail within a few hours of submitting my removal request. Talking to my roomie, I learned the problem computer only ran for a few hour before it was shutdown. Clearly, the blacklists are quite sensitive--which is good. I used this link to check on the status of our IP, but also tried Hef's link left in the comments. Since I keep a separate e-mail address for everyone, I don't run a check against blacks myself. If I start getting SPAM, I delete the address and tell that person to run a spyware check. I still see the mail server logs rejecting e-mail for addresses that have been dead for 8 years (addresses I've posted on Usenet with the "remove this" in the address).
    Since SPAM isn't an issue for me, the most annoying things I get in e-mail are news letters and advertisements from companies I recently made purchase from. New Egg is one of the worst. Every time you buy something, they automatically place you back on the advertisement list. When you request off the list, you are off until you buy something else. They are not the only ones to do this--but one of the companies I buy from rather regularly where I see this happening. I'd say something about how this likely annoys customers, but I'm not the picture of a "typical" anything. I see very few advertisements. I don't listen to the radio, don't own a TV, throw away all junk mail before opening it, don't get SPAM and I run adblocking software on my web browser. I make a point out of not buying anything I see intrusively advertised--that is, if a billboard distracts me enough while driving so I see what it's advertising for, I make a point not to buy that product from that company. I personally feel that advertising of this nature is intrusive, and companies that take part in it don't deserve my business. The only advertisements I do support are ads in Google searches. If I'm looking to buy a gizmo, type it into Google and see ads for companies selling it, I'm going to buy it from one of them. Googles ads are not as intrusive--they are highlighted and/or off to one side and only text--and I don't have a problem with that. Kinda wish more companies would take that kind of approach.

       Preformed surgery on a 24V battery charger for my electric string trimmer (aka. Weedwhacker).  It gave out sometime this winter while the device was sitting on the charger.  Now the battery is completely dead and I need to get a charge back in it. 
   The charger is basically a just wall-wart.  It was housed in plastic and more or less sealed.  To open it, I tried a router bit on my rotary tool (aka. Dremel) and cut the housing in half.  It was messy, but worked well.  Once inside, I started to probe around for obvious signs of trouble.  Everything looking in order, I broke out the multimeter and started probing voltages.  The transformer appeared to be doing nothing.  I tried putting a regulated 24 VDC supply after the filter capacitor and the charging circuit came to life.  So, I cut off the transformer and measured the voltage with nothing connected to it.  Still nothing.  I moved the 24 VDC power to the where the transformer had been located, and the charger again came to life.  Looks to me like the transformer quit.  How and why remains a question.  I know transformers can go out if they overheat and melt their internals.  But this transformer looks in really good shape.  (*shrug*) 
   My plan is to allow the battery to charge overnight.  Tomorrow, I'll try the string trimmer out and see if it's battery holds enough charge to make fixing this thing worth while.  I can order a new transformer online--if that's what it takes to fix it.  But a new battery and charger might make other options more cost effective.
    Pictured is the charging circuit with the transformer removed and the external 24 VDC power jumped in.