Computer Cabling

Earlier this week, we had a maintenance window at work which included re-running about 9 cables in a computer rack. As often happens with cleanups, once I looked at the rack, I decided to cleanup all the cables - network, fiber (disk) and power. This was once of the worst racks, but we have many more to do. I'm going to be beating in to my guys to keep it neat so we don't get this bad again, but we'll see. In theory, the cables are bound together by type, but still loose enough that new cables can be run without taking it all apart. Ahh, the joys of Velcro.

Below are before and after pictures. In the spirit of full disclosure, the before picture is actually another rack - I didn't think of taking pictures until I was done. The pictures were taking with my new Blackberry Storm (which I have promised to blog about soon) - I'm still getting used to the camera, so that explains the lack of focus.

Before	After

Christmas Lights Photography

As I talked about in my Christmas Lights 2008 post, I did a bit of Christmas lights this year. After I got them all done back on Dec. 18, I took a bunch of pictures of me and Nate's handiwork (would you expect anything else?). I was completely dissatisfied with the pictures, so of course I went right to Google to find out how to take pictures of Christmas lights. Some suggestions were obvious (no flash, use a tripod), others were arcane with f-stops, apertures and manual white balance, but almost all said 2 things: shoot the pictures at dusk and set the white balance to tungsten (aka incandescent bulbs). Shooting at dusk means you get both the lights and the background. The trick is to bracket your shots over time and then pick the best ones. (Much easier now that it's just pixels instead of film). The white balance setting accounts for the fact that all those bulbs (or at least all of mine) have little tungsten filaments in them which glow yellow. Using the tungsten setting gives everything, like the snow, a cool blue glow and makes the sky look awesome. If I remember my physics correctly that makes sense since blue and yellow combined make white.

I headed out at about 4:15 PM on Christmas and after choosing some prime spots, I started shooting at about 4:25 PM. I knew this was too early since I was still able to hold the camera and shoot without a tripod. As it get darker, I kept shooting every few minutes. It was cold enough that I had to wear gloves and the driveway refroze, but luckily neither me nor the camera ended up on the ground. I managed, too, not to get run over when I shot from the street. I even got a compliment on the lights from a driver who missed me. The one element of the lights that I seemed to get a good bracketing on was the inflatable Nativity, which I talk about in my Christmas Lights 2008 post. Below are the shots over time with the time stamps. I think I like the 5:01 PM picture the best, but the one before that is OK, too. You can see that by 5:10 PM, I was just getting the lights.


For those of you who don't celebrate Christmas, I suppose these techniques would work just as well on a Menorah or whatever holiday decorations you put up.

Christmas Lights 2008

This year, I put up more Christmas lights and decorations outside than I ever have in my 7 years here in Bethlehem. Some of it certainly was the fact that we had a warm weekend when Nate was here and a warm day that I took as vacation. (OK - warm meaning in the 40's for those of you not in the Northeast) I think too that since last year I didn't get to do any lights because the weather was cold and wet and, with a torn ACL, I really wasn't up for climbing on the roof. Maybe subconsciously this year I wanted to spruce the place up since all we hear is bad news about economy and since Kenny hasn't done as much here since he has been focused on his new house. Whatever the reason, Nate and I had a blast doing the lights and decorations. Here is the finished display. (My Christmas Lights Photography talks all about how I took the pictures, so I won't repeat here.)


Nate did all of the lights on the porch and the shed and most of the work on the inflatable Nativity. I did the net lights on the shrubs, the lights on the stairs, the toy soldiers (which NatesMom and I got many years ago), the luminary bags and the electrical, as well as helping Nate with the Nativity. Kenny got the luminary bags in an after Christmas sale a couple years ago for $1 for a box of five. They are all electric and you can string up to 30 bags together. I spent a lot of time working on them but they came out looking pretty nice. I used a combination of timers and light sensors so all I had to do every night was the Nativity. For an added fun touch, I replaced the regular bulbs in the driveway lamps with red bulbs.




The most fun part of the display is the inflatable Nativity. I've been kind of anti-inflatables in the past. They usually are snowmen or Santas and always seemed to be deflated or blown around when I saw them. But when I went to Lowes (see Is the Christmas Season Over?), they had the inflatable Nativity with life size Mary and Joseph for 50% off. I've looked for a life sized Nativity in the past, so I decide that if it was still there a week later when I had Nate to help me carry it, I'd buy it. It was, so I bought it and Nate got a trip to Longhorn Steakhouse out of the deal. Nate's take on the set was a little different - he wondered what it meant that the only inflatables left were the religious themed ones. The set consists of the inflatable manger, Mary and Joseph who are heads with clothes, attached to metal pipes. Baby Jesus is attached to his "bed". Everything gets screwed in the ground and has held up pretty well despite snow storms and wind. Nate and I had a slight physics failure by not attaching the guy wires at 45 degrees which caused the manger to fall over backwards, but that was remedied by attaching a bungee cord from the manger to Joseph.

I've gotten some nice compliments on the display and even though I spent a bit to get it all right this year, everything from the decorations, to the lights to the electrical should last for many more years.

Columbus Day Parade

On Columbus Day, the NHHS Band marched in the 63rd Annual Columbus Day Parade in New York City. Nate carried the American flag, since they don't make him push his bells down 5th Avenue. The parade route is 35 blocks down 5th Avenue, north from 44 th to 79th St. (Google Maps has street view for NYC - if you click on the man icon, you will see St. Patrick's Cathedral. You can pretty much see the route as Nate did by panning or dragging the little man icon around) That is almost 2 miles on a October day that hit 90 degrees (Dispute global warming now, Nate?) Nate was one tired puppy when he got home. Here is a video of NHHS performance in the parade:




For those of you that like the technical info.....I recorded the whole 3 hour parade coverage on my Tivo. Fortunately, I was also watching the parade at work, so I knew about where in the recording NHHS performed. Otherwise it would have been 3 hours of searching through opera performances and ads for every Italian business in greater NYC. I copied the Tivo file to my laptop when I got home (almost 4 hours for a 3 hour video!). I then used a video editing program called VideoReDo Plus to extract the MPEG from the Tivo file and edit out everything except the intro and the band's performance - 3 hours down to 1:42 - yes, that's a minute and 42 seconds. I then created a YouTube account (which is easy since I have a Google account for, among other things, this blog) and uploaded the video. A word about the quality....I have an old-fasioned, non-HD TV and Tivo, so the resolution is 480 x 480 and I think the upload to YouTube does some compression, too. We all know it's Nate with the flag, but I doubt anyone could pick him out without some hints.

Nüvi

A diversion from my postings about the Cornerstone Festival to tell you about the Garmin Nüvi. This is a GPS unit and one of the coolest gadgets I own. (www.garmin.com/nuvi) I have the 350 model, as do N&V. It is about the size of a deck of cards and contains maps and listings for the entire US. In a nutshell, you look up where you want to go and it gets you there. It has voice prompts and text-to-speech, so not only do you get "turn right", you get "turn right on Main Street". We have our set on "Emily", the British voice.

So far, it has not steered us wrong. I used it to get to a couple golf courses and it literally gave me directions to the front door of the clubhouse. For the Cornerstone trip, it was awesome. It got us to every hotel, the drop off for Jeff (a tanning salon) and even found the festival. I'm not sure how I lived without it on long trips. It actually had a "shortcut" through a corn field -- still a "real" road - that saves us about 5 minutes going to the festival.

It will recalculate the route if you intentionally or unintentionally go off course. It does have an annoying habit of doing this when you get off for gas or food, but this could be handy if you wander a bit to find that pizza you are longing for.

My favorite feature is when you tell it to 'Go Home". It's like cheap insurance - wherever you are, you can always at least get home.