Blinky Lights and Shiny Objects

...by taking things out of it. There was a weekend last year when I finally understood and internalized the raw fact that we weren't moving into a new house any time soon.  We'd been in our starter house for nine years, and I checked Zillow.com, and something went "click" in my brain.  If I wanted to live somewhere better with more space, it would be because I upgraded this house and got rid of a bunch of stuff. The upgrades have gone very well, and should form the subject of many posts which are relevant to the title of this blog.  This essay is about de-cluttering, specifically lessons and hang-ups experienced by a pair of engineers who were raised by people who were raised by people who lived through the depression. I had previously considered "clutter" to mean useless trinkets set out for decoration, so I didn't think I had any.  Nope.  I could look around my house as a whole, and think, "How do two adults and one cat need so much STUFF to...

Public Service Announcement: your local mall might have a 3D body scanner that will tell you what pants and jeans will fit your shape.  A Me-Ality kiosk recently came on-line at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, IL, and I tried it out this week. If you can stand still for less than 20 seconds, fully clothed with your shoes on, and you can handle low-power radio waves reflecting off your skin, you can do this.  They ask you to fill out a form with your email address, and it is worth giving a real email address, because of the information you will be getting. After the scan, you get a bar code that refers to your measurement data now stored in their system. Mercifully, they never show or print a picture of your 3D point-cloud derriere. They do print a list of all the pants in the mall in their database that should fit you.  For me, that was 6 types of dress pants and 20 types of jeans.  (I was expecting "ERROR DATA NOT FOUND" as my only result, so this is a lot of mat...

I play Minecraft .  One of the things you can do in Minecraft is farm resources.  I finished building a greenhouse around an island last night.  Here is a screenshot of a view of the greenhouse taken from the glassed-in second story of my home base.  That is where I grow wheat and pumpkins . The sugar cane plants along the shore line are also part of my cultivation project.  Unlike my gardening skills in real life, I'm getting significant virtual return on these plots.

I wouldn't usually bring a large, expensive camera on a trip that is mainly about relaxing and sand.  But, now I've got this older DSLR that just sits around most of the time and wouldn't get $200 on eBay if I tried to sell it.  I took it to Cozumel for our vacation, and at the very least I loved having a real viewfinder to look through on those sunny days.  I only brought a few lenses, none in my "first tier" class, but more than serviceable in the Caribbean light.  I even treated the post-processing more casually than usual, simply clicking the "Perfectly Clear" box in Bibble 5 and adjusting very few other parameters.  Here are some of my favorite pictures:

I figured out what lens I was going to get to cover the telephoto range.  LensRentals.com sells used lenses after they've been rented out for 20 weeks or so.  I bought a used copy of Sony's constant f2.8 aperture 70-200 zoom from them, which retails for $1800, for much less than that.  I am so happy with this lens!  I used it on a tripod to shoot a wedding ceremony, and with the in-body image stabilization on my camera I am also able to hand-hold it for walk-around shots like the one above. The only problem is that now I want to upgrade all of my lenses to glass this nice.  No one ever said photography was a cheap hobby.